Census Courses
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All Census Courses
Creating Interactive iPlans with iBooks Author
This course provides an introduction to the basic functions of Apple iBooks Author and demonstrates how the program can be used to develop interactive documents such as interactive iPlans.
AutoCAD for 3D Modeling
Most planners and designers don't use just one drawing or visualization program. In this course you'll learn how to create 3D drawings in AutoCAD and how to use AutoCAD in concert with other programs, such as Adobe Illustrator and Sketchup, to create illustrative plan, section, and perspective views.
AutoCAD for Site Planning
This course establishes a workflow for an illustrative site plan, including how to represent existing conditions and create detailed plans for specific areas within a larger project. Building on AutoCAD 101, learn to draw more complex plans using aerial imagery, photography, and hand-drawn sketches as the base layer.
AutoCAD 101
This course provides an introduction to AutoCAD’s essential functions for first-time users and demonstrates how to create site plans, street sections, and other two-dimensional scaled diagrams.
Build A WordPress Website
This ‘bootcamp’ course will help you develop a website layout using a self-hosted version of the popular content management system WordPress in under an hour. Learn to create and publish posts and pages, change the look of the site by using different themes, and manage the navigation, menus, and other content, such as as contributed modules and an image gallery.
Tactical Urbanism: How It's Done
From unsanctioned crosswalks to city-led "Pavement-to-Plaza" programs, instructor Mike Lydon describes the success of short-term, temporary projects in influencing long-term physical and policy changes in cities across the United States and Canada.
Gephi for Network Analysis and Visualization
Network Analysis helps urban planners, designers, and policy makers explore the dynamics and complexities of social networks and organizations. This course demonstrates the ways you can use the open-source Gephi software to visualize and analyze online social networks.
Video for Planners
Video can be a highly effective tool for communicating urban planning issues as well as increasing public knowledge and community engagement. This video course will walk you through the three steps of creating a video: capturing the footage, creating the video with editing software, and distributing video across the web. We’ll look at examples of urban planning departments that have used video well, and review different content types that you can use as a model.
SketchUp for Planners - Intermediate Part 1
Building on Introductory SketchUp for Planners, this course introduces intermediate SketchUp users to the program’s geolocation functions and demonstrates how to create more complex models of planned projects or developments. Additionally, this course illustrates how to create and export video walk-throughs of SketchUp models using the program’s animation features.
Ethics: Balancing a Business Friendly Planning Environment, Part 2
Over the past several years, the private sector, led by developers, has increasingly courted, conflicted and collaborated with planning departments amid shrinking budgets. As business interests engage and influence public agencies and planning strategy, the role of ethics is of increasing importance for the practicing planner. This is the second of a two-part series that evaluates and analyses the role of planners, from public window staff to department heads, in an increasingly business-friendly environment.
CommunityViz Introduction
In this course you will learn practical applications for CommunityViz, one of the world's premiere GeoDesign and planning scenario tools. Planners, resource managers, local and regional governments, and others use CommunityViz to help them make decisions about development, land use, transportation, conservation and more.
Illustrator for Planners - Advanced
Adobe Illustrator is widely recognized among design professionals as the premier vector drawing software, with many valuable design and mapping applications for urban planning. This course builds upon the Intermediate Illustrator for Planners course, going into more detail on how the program can be used for logo design, map making and other uses.
Drawing in the Landscape: The Adventure Begins
This is the first course in the Drawing series. In this course, you will learn techniques for drawing, sketching and rendering in the field. You will learn how to draw lines and contours, understand perspective, and render tone and value with light and shadow.
Design in Planning: An Overview
In this course, Planetizen brings you an overview of design in planning. Using real world examples from design guidelines, plans, and manuals, city planner Jason Kambitsis looks at how code, practice and guidelines precipitate design and the form of our cities.
SketchUp for Planners - Intermediate Part 2
In addition to accurately modeling projects, as demonstrated in the introductory courses, SketchUp is also useful for illustrating more abstract concepts, such as FAR, dimensional requirements and design guidelines. This course demonstrates how planners use SketchUp to illustrate requirements in zoning codes, design guidelines and form based codes.
Ethics: Balancing a Business Friendly Planning Environment
Over the past few decades and increasingly over the past several years, the private sector, led by developers, has increasingly courted, conflicted and collaborated with planning departments amid shrinking budgets. As business interests engage and influence public agencies and planning strategy, the role of ethics is of increasing importance for the practicing planner. This is the first of a two-part series that evaluates and analyses the role of planners, from public window staff to department heads, in an increasingly business-friendly environment.
SketchUp for Planners - Intermediate Part 3
Combining SketchUp and Adobe Creative Suite, this course demonstrates how to use SketchUp together with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign to create illustrative and informative photo simulations, perspective views, sections and site plans.
Drawing in the Landscape: Pen, Pencil and Watercolor
This is the second course in the Drawing series. This course focuses on the benefits of other mediums, using pencil, pen, watercolor to draw an assortment of common built environment features: plants, people, architecture as well as exploring panoramic vistas.
SketchUp for Planners - An Introduction
Get started using SketchUp, the popular, easy-to-learn 3D digital modeling program. This course provides an introduction to how planners and architects represent three-dimensional objects in two-dimensions, with step-by-step instructions for creating and using simple 3D models.
Tactical Urbanism: An Introduction
Developed in conjunction with other movements, the Tactical Urbanism approach allows a host of local actors to test new concepts before making substantial political and financial commitments. Sometimes sanctioned, sometimes not, Tactical Urbanism features the following five characteristics: phased instigation, meeting local planning challenges, realistic and short term, low risk-high gain, and stakeholder capacity building.