In the past, designers needed to painstakingly do all of their designs by hand. Not only does this take a long time, but any mistakes that are made can be disastrous.
Thankfully, digital technology means doing designs by hand is no longer necessary. These days, most designers have adopted CAD technology to help them make designs more efficiently.
What are the advantages of CAD? This article tells you 5 of them.
1. Increased Productivity
Computer-aided design helps the designer to quickly gain a good understanding of their design. By using CAD, you can easily add things like animation, which shows what the finished product will look like in action. This means the designer can quickly recognize any issues the design might have before production has even begun.
Using CAD software can make it a lot quicker to come up with a design than if you'd tried to draw something by hand. This means CAD can result in lower costs and faster turnaround times. When designing something using more conventional methods, if you made a mistake, you might have to start the whole design again.
Say, for instance, you made a mistake with the measurements. When you're using CAD, you can simply change the values to the correct ones.
If you switch to CAD software, there will be a short adjustment period where you'll have to get used to the software. Once you know how to use CAD software, you'll be able to come up with designs extremely quickly.
2. You Can Reuse Elements of Your Designs
Another great thing about CAD technology compared to sketching a design is you can easily reuse aspects of a previous design.
Say you want to make a variation on an existing design you've done. You can simply load up the old design, save a copy of it, and then make modifications to your original design. With certain projects, this can save you a huge amount of time.
If you need to go back to the drawing board and make changes to an initial design, CAD makes it a breeze. You can open up your old design and make the modifications.
For example, the client might want you to put a new logo on an existing design. If you've sketched this design by hand, you might have to start again from scratch. With CAD software, all you need to do is swap out one logo for the other.
Once you've worked in CAD for a while, you'll find it impossible to ever go back to sketching out designs by hand. Compared to CAD, sketching out designs will feel slow and inefficient.
3. Get a Quality Design On the First Attempt
In the past, if a design wasn't quite up to scratch, you would have no choice but to start again from the beginning. Typically, this could go on for a few more iterations of the design, until one was produced that everyone was happy with.
With CAD design, you'll hardly encounter a situation where you need to start again from scratch. If you make a mistake with CAD software, you can simply undo it.
CAD software also makes it easy to diagnose any potential problems with the design. When sketching out designs by hand, often, a fatal flaw with the design only comes to light after the design phase has already been completed. This would mean halting production and going back to the drawing board.
When you use CAD software to make your design, you can be confident that everything is going to work out as it should when you start production. CAD drawings let you get things right the first time rather than have you go through multiple iterations of the design.
4. One of the Biggest Advantages of CAD is Easy Collaboration
CAD software makes it incredibly easy to collaborate with other designers. You could save your design onto a cloud-based server and someone on the other side of the country could see the design on their screen within a few minutes. When it comes to collaboration, CAD software is lightyears ahead of sketching out design ideas by hand.
Another aspect of CAD that facilitates smooth collaboration is the fact that everyone is working to the same standards. If you and your collaborators are all using the same CAD software, there is little room for doubt. Everyone is designing things using the same workflow.
The trouble with hand-drawn sketches is that everyone has their own way of working and idiosyncrasies. This can make it difficult for other people to interpret their work properly.
If your company works with remote workers or has multiple locations, cloud-based CAD software is essential. Some are even mobile compatible, so you could even work on designs on your commute.
5. Change the Size and View as Needed
With hand-drawn designs, they can only ever show one single perspective.
But this isn't the case with CAD designs. You're free to zoom out and pan the camera around at your leisure. This can be an invaluable feature if you're working on a very large and detailed design.
Are There Any Disadvantages to CAD?
There's no doubt that CAD makes designers more productive and results in high-quality designs. However, there are a few disadvantages to working with this method.
For example, like with any kind of software, CAD has a learning curve. When a designer first starts working with a new piece of software, they might experience temporarily lowered productivity.
CAD Is a Good Investment
All in all, CAD technology is a great investment. Once you and your company have experienced the advantages of CAD, such as cloud-based design sharing, you'll never want to go back.
If you want to purchase CAD software, you should take your time and do your research. There are many different pieces of software out there with unique advantages and disadvantages.
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