Road Rage Book - Google SketchUp Workshop: Modeling, Visualizing, and Illustrating - page 232

arrows, callouts with text, various solid- and dotted-line Bezier curves, and
even water droplets and musical notes. No SketchUp plug-in was used for
this project.
New Approaches
The originality of my Road Rage project has far more to do with its application
than with the advanced features of SketchUp, per se. A testament to the excel-
lence of SketchUp as a software package is that a complete novice like me
could learn to create hundreds of illustrations in a relatively short time frame,
without having ever touched the software before. SketchUp is intuitive, stable,
and powerful. For my needs, it was the perfect combination of high quality
and ease of use, allowing my readers to project themselves into realistic
scenes to better understand the accompanying text.
Step 1: Episode Listing
Goal : To create a comprehensive episode listing.
Input : Real-life experience on the road.
Tool : Pen and notepad.
I mentioned earlier that my 20-year-old, hand-written Idiot Driver Topic manu-
script had been lost; so when the decision was made to re-create it, I needed
to start from scratch. But here is the surprising part: Of the topic's 112 epi-
sodes, I experienced about 75 of them in the very first day! That is right; in one
day's commute, 35 miles each way, I encountered 75 idiots and documented
each one of them. Of course, being one of the world's best drivers, I did so
without taking my eyes of the road, which meant that some of my notes were
darned near impossible to read.
Step 2: Chapter and Episode Titles
Goal : To organize episodes into logical chapters with clever titles.
Inputs : My imagination and the aforementioned episode listing.
Tool : Microsoft Excel.
The topic was organized into 15 chapters (called EXITs), which allowed the
reader to enjoy similar topics grouped together. For example, EXIT 3 is titled
The Importance of an Exit Strategy and it covers all the silly things bad drivers
do as they attempt to enter and exit from a highway. EXIT 8 is titled Park Place
and Bored Walk , which is all about parking lot indiscretions.
Each episode, varying from one to four pages, has its own title as well. A few
favorites are the following:
• Make Up Your Mind, Not Your Face : About morons who apply makeup (or
shave) while driving
• Wrong Turn on Red : About those who do not seem to know how to make a
right turn on red