2 Years
20 Years
Darrin is a senior civil designer with experience in the design, drafting, and visualization of civil earthworks and infrastructure projects across water resources, oilsands, and airport sectors. He combines strong technical design and modeling skills with expertise in producing construction-ready drawing sets, material takeoffs, and detailed 3D visualizations that bring project designs to life.
We wanted to learn more about what sparked Darrin’s passion for design and here’s what he had to say:
What inspired you to pursue this career?
“When I was growing up, I would play a lot of sandbox video games like sim city – games where you could modify the frame add some infrastructure and just build your puzzle from the bottom up. When I went to high school, I really enjoyed the AutoCAD course. It was early AutoCAD, so there was not nearly the functionality that it has now, but I really enjoyed playing around creating simple drawings of figures.”
What is your educational background?
“I went to SAIT in Calgary to take the engineering design and drafting technology program. When I was taking that program the very first part of it was learning draft in fundamentals. I would draft on the board using scales, pens, and pencils to learn how to do proper drawing layouts and make it easy for the viewers. When I started off in my career, I also really enjoyed rendering so I was lucky enough to get on with a company that allowed me to spend some time learning how to take the Civil 3D models that we created and put them into another software and add things like trees, cars, and people to really help sell the products that we are designing.”
What is a typical day like for you?
“There is no typical day for me at NHC. I have the opportunity to work on a wide variety of projects – some take a couple of hours all the way to a couple of months to complete. Any given day, I could be processing topographic data, creating our design models, creating figures for reports. I could be creating drawing packages for our construction packages, or calculating some quantities and creating renderings. Renderings are one of the things I really enjoy doing. It is taking our design models and putting into images with cars, people, trees, and grass to try and help show the public and the client what we are proposing to do. One of the other things I really enjoy is working with other team members and helping solve problems. I enjoy helping other designers when they have issues and helping them trouble shoot and just throwing ideas back and forth to each other and trying to come up with creative solutions.”
