The Lost Art of Hand Drafting
I always find the constant change and progress of an industry to be interesting! The Interior Design profession is no exception. The broad and extensive direction offered to incoming collegiate students is amazing. Commercial and Contract Design, Hospitality Design, Residential Design, Industrial Design--are only a few options to be explored. But with the ever-changing technology and programs, I was interested to see how my education differed from those graduating Interior Design students of 2016. I am old school in so many ways. I love to draw and create by hand, so I prefer hand drawings over computer aided design (CAD). But it really does matter what area of the industry you are involved in, as to how much computer drawing is required. In my line of work - residential design - both forms are widely excepted and the majority of my clientele appreciate a hand sketch or floorplan.
In September, we added a new Designer to our team and she is a recent Interior Design Graduate. We decided to pull out some of our old (well, mine anyways) college projects to compare the different teaching styles and project content. It was so interesting to see the different rendering techniques that we each had learned and the varying mediums we all chose to use in our individual drafting.
Needless to say, each floorplan/rendering offered a unique aspect to the projects, but overall, our skills were all in line with one another. So you are probably wondering who's is who's and when were each of them done. I'm not going to say who each rendering belongs to but it isn't too hard to tell which one is the most ancient. My time in design school was 1994-1999, Jodi attended my alma mater - GO POKES! - from 2000-2004, and Shelby is our most recent college graduate of 2015. It really was fun for each of us to reminisce about our college professors and experiences!
During this experiment my son even got caught up in the fun! He is very creative and quite the little artist (not sure where he gets that). I was creating a drawing/rendering for an exterior elevation project and he was so intrigued with how I was using the markers and pens that he wanted a quick lesson. I was blown away with his ability to learn from my work and I'm pretty sure we have a budding architect on our hands. I love to see skills and trades passed on to younger generations and I will continue to show appreciation for hand drafting and rendering. I am always willing to share my opinions and experiences with those interested in perusing a career in the Interior Design field and I would love to hear each of your thoughts on hand drawing versus CAD drawing. Draw on.....
