Successfully estimating your project can be the make or break moment that defines your company success. How do other folks do it? We talk about landscape estimating and billing on today's episode of the Green Meridian podcast. Our special guest is Jon Bryant with StickyBid, an application that you can upload to your phone or laptop that allows you to present clients with quick estimates and comprehensive billings in an easy to use and graphically rich format. You can find them at Stickybid.com.

We also talk about Zapier.com, an interface that helps you transfer data between different software systems - for example between CRM and estimating system. Service Autopilot, Jobber, Aspire and LMN are also discussed....and we ramble on about a few of the problems that contractors and designers face in estimating and billing projects with a few troublemakers - Bill Peregrine of Earthdance Organics, Will Anstey from Devonshire Landscapes and Rick Perry from Fallingwater Gardens.

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For this episode, we speak with Ryland Longoni of Federated Insurance (rjlongoni@fedins.com), a specialist insuring landscape designers, landscape architects, general contractors and other green industry professionals. Ryland answers key questions, such as "How much insurance do I need?", "How much liability insurance is enough?" - and covers the ins and outs of Errors & Omissions insurance, talks about importance of appropriate text in your contracts and discusses a few key questions that green industry folks should be asking their insurance agents.

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What if there was almost universal agreement on what constitutes good landscape design? What if we could break a "hidden code" that unlocks the secret to any successful landscape layout? It's fascinating to consider that human beings have a largely consistent sense of what constitutes beauty in art - most of us stand in awe of Michelangelo's talent and line up for hours to see the works in the Louvre or The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's safe to say that folks generally agree about traditional artistic beauty. (Sure there are dissenters and outliers, but let's ignore those folks for a moment). My point is to ask if there might be a "code", or a formula, that could define a sensibility of comfort and calm - beauty really - in a landscape? The studies I found can lead us to a fairly amazing understanding of how humans view our outdoor environments. This kind of knowledge might inform and underpin how we approach landscape design - and set the groundwork for some reliable rules that help us create beautifully functional outdoor spaces.

Have you ever looked closely and been struck by the beauty in a carefully hand fitted stone wall? Do you find certain kinds of garden layouts more appealing than others? Of course you do, and while we can't say that everyone completely agrees, there is a certain consistency in taste that arises generally - and importantly - throughout the world. When you think about it, there is a general throughline within which we agree on this. Thinking about this, I came across a number of studies in which survey research was done internationally - related to different landscape paintings and how different people experienced various outdoor views. And what struck me was that the result of this was an unexpected consistency, in which a singular view was selected by a disproportionately large number of those surveyed as being the most appealing.

Think about this. A singular type of view was consistently preferred. Why is this? This is a crucially important subject within the context of basic human understanding - and surprisingly I've never really heard of this subject spoken about much in the fields of landscape architecture or landscape design. We've all read about the 'rules of design' of course, from finding Fibonacci's spiraling ratio repeated in everything from a flowers corolla to the Crab nebula. We've wondered at the proportions of Leonardo's 'Vitruvian Man' - and some of us have studied architecture and the Palladian ratio of column sizing - and scratched our heads over what makes Frank Lloyd Wright's work so visually stunning - or Japanese gardens to be so contemplative and sublime. The incredible thing to consider here - is that studies will generally show that a disproportionate number of respondents will favorably choose a singular type of view over any other. Why is that? As someone who designs outdoor spaces, I feel like I generally know what I like, but the esoteric question here is, why do I like it? ... is it that I'm trained to find certain types of alignments more beautiful than others? Or is there something deeper and more instinctual at play? Let's talk about this in this - what defines universal beauty in the landscape...

References:

Jay Appleton and Prospect Refuge Theory: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494424001178

Kaplan & Kaplan's Preference Model: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169204613002375

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