No Color for CAD Drawings Needed.... When Printing For Dogs

CADghetti I received a Google Alert for the keyword BIM this AM that lead to a press release about a construction firm in Neenah, WI (a town just down the road from me). It was hard to figure who the release was aimed at, as it was a boilerplate ‘we use BIM, and are damn excited about it!” type of release, but with a bit of digging it became more interesting.

I clicked on the link to the construction firm in question, Miron Construction, which has a better than average corporate page in that it had quite a few links to articles. Hiding between some greenwashing, was a link to an article by Peter Lawrence titled “Changing the Color Paradigm: Expanding the role of color in construction documentation”. My attention was piqued. The subject is near and dear to me because I have experience on both sides of construction drawings.

In the article, Peter gives an example of a workshop he performs. He gives a group a couple D-size drawings, one monochrome, and the other color. Starting with the monochrome drawing, he asks them to count the number of sinks in the drawing, and the group responds with 7, 8, or 9 sinks. He then asks them to count the sinks on the color drawing, where they all get the correct answer, 10. He doesn’t mention this, but I’ll bet it took less than half the time to get the rightanswer with the color drawing. In my experience, even the best people we had at one company made numerous mistakes on our black and white drawings. It is no wonder why, they looked like black spaghetti served up on king-sized toilet paper. It actually hurt your eyes trying to decipher the mess.

The drawings in question were the mechanical drawings for large yachts. They contained frames (the ribs of the ship), floor grids, piping and the rest of the mechanicals, and approximately a bazillion other things. Adding to the confusion were hundreds of black leader lines and the unfortunate circumstance that many of the disparate elements in the drawings were roughly the same size…. about 2″ wide. It was quite difficult for even the designer to make things out once it was printed. After all, it was in color when they designed it.

The result was that there were tons of mistakes, and perpetual calls from the shop floor to the design department for clarification. It got so disruptive at times that the design department had to implement “no call” days in order to get any design work done…. which meant that work on the floor had to be done out of sequence. It was a total mess.

Conversely, when given a drawing in color, much like in Peter’s presentation, the guys on the floor could immediately see what was going on, the sun shone brighter, and they got to work quicker –but in spite of that, color was just not in the budget. At this company, color printing was reserved for the charts & graphs that were used to describe why color wasn’t necessary for shop drawings. As Mike Tyson once (always) said, it was ludaqwiss.

That’s right, production took a back seat to awesome presentations. Go figure. Things like color ink, and paper quality are always the lowest lying fruit, and are the first place budget cuts are made. Kind of like shortening your legs because you are losing the race.

Much, much more on this at a later date. Maybe I’ll describe my valiant attempt —and epic failure—-in getting laptops on the shop floor. The 64bit version of Confidity was just released today, and I’ll be posting on that later today. And lastly, dogs actually see in primary colors, and prefer you print in color as well.