Expert Training

Throughout this book, I emphasize things like setting up your drawings properly, drawing objects on appropriate and consistent layers, and specifying suitable text fonts and heights. These practices amount to conforming to a CAD standard.

You need to do these things if you work with or exchange drawings with others. If you don’t, several bad things will happen. You’ll be pegged as a clueless newbie by experienced drafters, who understand the importance of CAD consistency. Even if your ego can handle the contempt, you’ll make everyone’s work slower and more difficult. And if the project has electronic drawing submittal requirements, you may find that your client rejects your DWG files and demands that you make them conform to the CAD standards in the contract.

The aesthetics of CAD

Manual drafting veterans frequently complain that CAD drawings don’t look as good as the drawings that they used to create by hand. “Too ‘flat,’ too cartoonish, and inconsistent” are some of the refrains that you hear. These complaints are not just the whining of old-timers. Good manual drafters were justifiably proud of the appearance of their drawings. They focused on making the finished bluelines look sharp and read well.

When computers and CAD software got into the act, it became easy for CAD drafters to focus on the screen image and pay less attention to the plotted output. In the early days, CAD users struggled with a new way of making drawings and didn’t have as much time to make them look good. By the time that CAD became commonplace, a new crop of CAD users had grown up without the benefit of learning how to make good-looking drawings on paper.

There’s no reason that CAD drawings can’t look as good as manual drawings. It’s a matter of understanding the look that you’re after and caring enough to want to achieve it. If you see some especially clear and elegant printed drawings, find out who drew them and take that person out to lunch. You’ll probably learn some techniques that you can translate into making better CAD drawings. You may also gain new respect for the skills of those who made handsome and functional drawings with the simplest of tools.

Even if you work solo and don’t have any particular requirements imposed from outside, your own work will go more smoothly and look better if you adhere to a reasonably consistent way of doing things in AutoCAD. You’ll certainly find plotting easier and more predictable.

CAD standards originally grew out of a desire to achieve a graphical consistency on the plotted drawings that mirrored the graphical consistency on hand-drafted drawings. Before the days of CAD, most companies had manual drafting standards that specified standard lettering (text) sizes, dimension appearance, symbol shapes, and so on. Sometimes these standards were based on standard industry reference books, such as the Architectural Graphic Standards.

As CAD users became more sophisticated, they realized that CAD standards needed to incorporate more than just the look of the resulting plot. CAD drawings contain a lot more organizational depth than printed drawings — layers, screen colors, blocks, xrefs, text and dimension styles, and the like. If these things aren’t subject to a modicum of standardization, then different people who work on the same drawings or projects are likely to end up stumbling over — or throwing things at — one another.

The first job of CAD standards is to impose some graphical consistency on plotted output. CAD standards also encourage consistency in the way that people create, assign properties to, organize, and display objects in the CAD file.