Sketchup is an amazingly intuitive and powerful tool we can use for quick design studies, diagramming, or as a base for more polished presentation graphics.  That said, its ease of use often means that new users miss out on some of the fundamentals and cause themselves giant headaches down the road. 

In order to alleviate some of those woes I used the downtime I had between projects to develop a beginner's class and reference guide that pulled a bunch of those pieces together in one place: 

Download the full-size guide here. 

Anyone who has worked in Sketchup knows that there are times when it JUST WON'T DO WHAT YOU NEED IT TO DO.  Luckily, the designers left the door open for programmers to develop their own tools that can expand on the core functionality.  I took some of the tools that I found most useful and packaged them together to distribute them to project teams.  In the end the designers were faster, more creative, and less frustrated!  Although I have *ahem* a few more tools than that -- my Sketchup toolbar looks like this: 

Lastly, as great as Sketchup is -- it is almost always immediately recognized as Sketchup.  There are several great rendering plugins (I use Twilight Render) available, but clients don't always need (or want to pay for) finished renderings.  With a few small Photoshop tricks, graphics straight from Sketchup can become presentation-ready images without a significant time investment:

Maybe even parking structures can be interesting?