Manual v/s Digital Drawings – Which ones are better?

Computer Aided Design(CAD) drafting has brought about a renaissance in technical drawings in various industries. Whether its architectural, engineering, construction, manufacturing or fashion, CAD is replacing the old fashioned style of handcrafted drawings. Though physical drawings are more organic, advanced technical drafting tools and automation software have finally made their way to change the way designers articulate their ideas.

Today, let us check out some merits and demerits of traditional style of drawings and how digital document conversion has affected the business functionality and workflow.

Time Constraint:

During manual drawings designers used physical drafters fixed to a drawing board, pencils, pens, compasses, protractors, triangles and many other drafting devices. The drawings were carefully done with calculated mindful strokes by the technical people like architects, engineers and diploma holders. These hand drawn sketches were time consuming as compared to CAD software that provide inbuilt tools and techniques to draw and analyse the proposed design.

Moreover, CAD allows you to create a number of customized templates with basic design and use them repeatedly in numerous projects. Saving a lot of time in drafting the basic designs CAD drawings are quicker and more accurate than traditional ones. However, since manual drawings are sketched by technically sound people, these drawings are more creative, genuine and visionary than digital representations.

Overall Cost and Savings:

Major expenses in a traditional drafting methodology is for a drafting table or a drawing board, pencils, pens, a drafter or T-scale, triangles, french curves, erasers, compass and so on. These hardly cost much as compared to buying and installing a CAD software.

Moreover, paper and pencil doesn’t require expensive maintenance cost while you need to invest a lot of money to hire IT experts and system technicians to keep the CAD system up and running. Not only this, CAD software needs annual update subscriptions which are pretty costly.

Furthermore, the designers need to be trained appropriately before they can use a CAD software, whereas architects and designers are already experts in sketching on paper.

Better Presentation and Easy Saving Options:

However, unlike the manual drafting method, CAD allows easy perseverance, sharing and retrieval of designs by proficiently saving them on a digital archive. In turn it also saves the environment by reducing the use of papers to a massive amount. Moreover, CAD drafting services reduces errors drastically which is almost unavoidable if the designs were made hand made.

Though expensive, CAD has the capability to transform an idea into a 3D model effortlessly which is quite a tiresome work if done manually. Not only this, but modification of a particular design or drawing is extremely easy with digital blueprints than they are with paper prints. Correcting error with expert tools hardly takes time and are done more accurately as compared to manual editing.

So, what type of drawings work the best for you? Manual drawings have genuineness but presently CAD is gaining popularity with its innumerable benefits. Though spending on a CAD software and its proper maintenance might seem to be an extravagant deal but the ease it brings into planning and designing is truly commendable.

For affordable CAD drafting services, email at info@documentscanning.co.in