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The Art of Drafting – Taking time to think

Think before you draw.

Hand drafting took a long time.  It caused you to think before you actually set information to paper.  Thinking is good.  In today’s fast paced CAD and BIM markets, the software moves quicker than some people think.

Moving from one sheet to another caused you to give pause and think “Am I done?”.  Since you had to remove the vellum or mylar or whatever from the drafting board, you stopped and thought about your next step.  Do I want to commit to removing this file now?  You can say that it is easier now to call up a drawing that when needed when you realize you need to add something.  But that is a break in the flow of thought.  Stopping and starting jars the thought patterns and derails creative and detail oriented thought.  Deep thought in a unified direction is better. I am sure that you have seen disjointed CAD files because they were created piecemeal.

Starting a new sheet was a daunting task, again causing you to pause.  Do I have enough info to get started?  Drafting has always been an iterative process, but the iterations were much longer.  When you had to add a sheet to a set, you use to first see where the data you were adding might fit on an existing sheet.  Not as often now.  Just click “NEW” and start drawing.

I use to be a Technical Illustrator.  It was a moonlighting job that I worked at night.  Boy that is going back a ways.  I would work all night long on one or two sheets, creating technical documents to show assemblies and systems in exploded views.  It was tedious and took some planning to figure out how to get down on paper what the graphics were trying to convey.

It was a thinking process.  I cannot tell you how many times I have heard some designer say that he wished the drafter would just think about what they are drawing.  It used to be forced upon us.  Now it is becoming a lost art.