From the course: AutoCAD for Mac 2020: Construction Drawings

Conveying intent - AutoCAD for Mac Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD for Mac 2020: Construction Drawings

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Conveying intent

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- [Narrarator] One of the main thrusts, or purposes, behind drafting is the documentation of your design. Also, called intent, or design intent, so that it can be created in the real world. This means your design intent is created accurately and repeatedly by anyone of sufficient skill. Another way of saying this is that what you've designed and had in your head is what is actually constructed. This requires the annotations are clearly read and understood by multiple people using standard drafting practices. One way of looking at drafting is that you need to communicate your design intent to someone you may never meet in any way. Someone may be using your plans to construct a building five months or 50 years after you drew them. You may never be on the same continent with the people actually swinging the hammers to construct your design. Therefore, every bit of information, every important detail, every unique concept that you need to convey must be communicated fully in your drawing. If the black lines that make up your pages, whether they be lines, text, or hatch patterns, do not convey your design intent clearly, the constructed product may not be what you designed. Now this might be something purely aesthetic, or it might be something more serious, like something structural. But nevertheless, if your drawings are not clear and communicative, then your design intent does not pass to the contractors who are actually building the structure. In AutoCAD for Mac, we create the plans and elevations themselves in what is called Model Space, seen here in the example. This designer has the elevation spread out across the Model Space in a way that I'm sure made sense to them; however, there are no dimensions or annotations aside from the column grid lines that we see here. They aren't even labeled as to which direction the elevations are facing. So, in AutoCAD for Mac, we'll use the tabs down here, called Layouts, to lay out our views in a logical fashion and add all of our annotations. Again, we'll use AutoCAD for Mac's Model Space to create our design and then use Layouts to annotate those designs, and together, this will convey our design intent to the reader.

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