I prepare a lot of parcel maps, surveys, engineering plans, etc., in my field (Civil Engineering) and when you look at old parcel maps you always see large decorative lettering stating the title of the map or subdivision. Sometimes a decorative North Arrow as well. This lettering was hand drawn of course (as everything was back then), and to me it was quite beautiful. Sometimes it had a lot of decorative calligraphy, scrollwork, hatching, shading, etc. You just don't see that anymore with everything done on computers. Everyone just picks a font that comes with their PC and goes with it. Hand drawing use to be an art form. For someone who loves drafting, and believes we have gained so much by CAD, I think we have also lost a lot of the "art" of drafting.

Lets bring back this dying art. Lets show that engineering is not just lines on paper. It can be beautiful too.  

It is so beautiful that I regularly see maps from those days mounted in frames and selling in art galleries for serious money.  Attempts to duplicate that stuff on the computer generally fail miserably.  I know that if I had the requirement to turn out that quality of lettering (either by hand or computer) I'd be starving under a bridge somewhere.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering
www.muleshoe-eng.com

"Belief" is the acceptance of an hypotheses in the absence of data.
"Prejudice" is having an opinion not supported by the preponderance of the data.
"Knowledge" is only found through the accumulation and analysis of data.

SethWCE,

   Cool looking hand lettered fonts show off the drafter's skill.  Selecting a cooling looking font does not show off the drafter's skill, especially if the font is not installed on my machine when I try to view the attractive drawing.

               JHG

I have some drawings drafted at the turn of the century (1900's) - JUST BEAUTIFUL!!

If you use certain fonts and italics - you get somewhat close!??

Now that those distractions are gone, we are compelled to put beauty into our actual art, instead of just decorating the frame.

Sounds like it's time to do a little reading...

May I suggest 'Just My Type:  A Book about Fonts', by Simon Garfield:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/just-my-type-simon-garfield/1100485475

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/books/just-my-type-a-book-about-fonts-by-simon-garfield-review.html

And if that's not enough, there's always the documentary, 'Helvetica', directed by Gary Hustwit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica_(film)

I downloaded it from iTunes (as well as the 2 other documentaries in Hustwit's trilogy on the impact of 'design' in our modern world).

A comment about old drawings; back where I first worked in engineering, we had several old company drawings, which were done in ink on cloth (linen), framed and hung in our corporate lobby.  When you first saw them, it took a moment before you realized that they actually weren't objets d'art .  One of them had even been highlighted with watercolors as it looked like perhaps something which was prepared so as to show a prospective customer what it was that he was buying, in this case, a brick-lined tunnel-oven for baking pan-bread.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
http://www.siemens.com/plm
UG/NX Museum:   http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
 

The closest I've been able to get, using a font that may actually be present or installable on someone else's machine, is "City Blueprint" font in AutoCAD.

I absolutely hate the default font/drawing setup in SolidWorks.
 

Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

I do like the combination of art and engineering into projects I do. It makes it feel more personal and unique which is why Times New Roman rules, haha just kidding

I did a font poll at one workplace where there were a lot of gray beards and fuzzy eyes. Century Gothic won hands down as most readable.

The company I work for just got rid of 2000 lbs of old drawings from the late 40's through early 60's. I grabbed one random C-size from the top of the pile dated 54' that had some nice sectional views of a mechanical part that I will frame. No doubt someone put some effort into it.

Previous company I was at found some old drawings lost in the back of a old flat-file and decided to keep 'em - pen and ink on starched linen done in 1918.

Drafting like this is a lost art form. I took basic drafing my first semester in engineering as a required course. By the time I graduated, it was no longer taught.

I have some extra Presstype...

Mike McCann
MMC Engineering
http://mmcengineering.tripod.com
 

Tick,
That is a nice font.  I like that each digit has a distinctive shape (it makes me crazy that it is nearly impossible for me to distinguish a "6" from an "8" in Arial, and Arial Bold is used on my car's dashboard and I never can tell them apart).  Microsoft Office uses Calibri and it is no better than Arial.  I may start using your hands down winner.

None of these fonts would make the cut in old time lettering.

David

The skills to produce decorative lettering went the same place the skills to produce a decently made drawing went. Lets bring that back too:)

Regards,

Mike

Lets explore another area.  PLEASE put dimensions on drawing!!!

Most of them say - JUST scale it.  After the are PDFed, faxed, emailed, etc - THERE IS NO SCALE.

Architects are the worse!!

Pah, dimensions are for wimps, we want MBD.

KENAT (Mechanical)

So what do you do if the model is wrong?
B.E.

The good engineer does not need to memorize every formula; he just needs to know where he can find them when he needs them.  Old professor

Personally, I like Garamond.  For the nostalgic side of things, I too, love the old drawings and beautifully scripted technical documents.

The practical side of me hates the eyestrain that is associated with it, however.  For the raw utilitarian purpose of communicating error-free technical data, I'll stick with Arial, Verdana, or Garamond.  The artsy stuff is nice, but too much room for error.

Just my 2 farthings!

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

berkshire - same thing as when the drawing is wrong.

One thing that I think was good about manual drafting is that it fostered a culture of attention to detail.  Committing designs to paper required thoughtfulness at every step in the game.  This kind of habitual mindfulness is hard to come by amongst youngsters.

I think it's ironic that the people who were best at imagining things in 3D were the ones who worked on paper their whole lives.  The drawings were 2D, but the designers had 3D versions of parts and layouts in their minds.

KENAT (Mechanical) 7 May 12 12:53  
berkshire - same thing as when the drawing is wrong.

Aha
B.E.

The good engineer does not need to memorize every formula; he just needs to know where he can find them when he needs them.  Old professor

the tick.
""" I think it's ironic that the people who were best at imagining things in 3D were the ones who worked on paper their whole lives.  The drawings were 2D, but the designers had 3D versions of parts and layouts in their minds. """

I think this was a function of board drafting. Orthographic or isometric was fairly easy compared to rendering a true perspective view of a part, and the person drawing it had to be more of an artist than a designer.
  So the tendancy was to keep it in your head rather than put it down on paper,and just do a series of orthographic views from different angles.  
B.E.

The good engineer does not need to memorize every formula; he just needs to know where he can find them when he needs them.  Old professor

berkshire,

   I cannot speak for TheTick, but I am good at spatial relationships.  This made it easier for me to work on a drafting board and on 2D CAD.  I can hand draw 3D sketches, complete with perspective.  I have done isometric drawings too.

   Back in the day, I was very quick to go to the drafting board and the orthogonal projections, mostly because my big design problems involved making things fit in the available space.  I need scale.  Ortho drawings get the job done if you don't have 3D CAD.  3D sketches are a good way to show off a mechanism, but I have rarely had to do that.  

               JHG

I'd do an entire set of civil site plans in pastel and watercolor if someone would pay me to do so.

Unsurprisingly, they won't.

:)

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East - http://www.campbellcivil.com

I prefer Leroy lettering templates to hand lettering, much nicer and less erasing. Today I use a Leroy font in AutoCAD for most all of my work except stencil and a few others.

I haven't done a hand engineering drawing since Engineering Fundamentals at Virginia Tech in 1989, and I haven't seen a drafting table since my second job, when they were giving them away to any takers. So it ended up not having relevance in my career, but one piece of advice my dad gave me was, "Don't get good at lettering, because you'll be the guy doing all of it."

Yep, I got that same advice from one of the engineers where I was co-oping summers while in engineering school

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

imagitec, that same advice applies to "fill in the blank" :)

Regards,

Mike

Gotta love advice to deliberately do a bad job, such a good work ethic. Maybe we should suggest this to that guy with the boring task in that other thread.

I've seen some great samples at previous jobs, pencil dwgs from the 50's on up, have a sample or 2 from the sunset of pencil in the 80's. Saw a simply beautiful B sheet fluttering down the street when Trico wipers cleared out of buffalo. Shoulda picked it up.

A short contract doing line-by line autocad 2D really helped my spatial, lettering and sketching skills. That and Autocad 3D, all wireframe, all of the time. Making sense of a bowl of rectilinear spaghetti.

I am 33 and was decently quick at the Leroy machine on some grading plans I had to update many years ago. Not as clean as the older guys though when they showed me how to properly use it. I also learned to letter in High School and prefer the Leroy Machine to hand lettering. But then you can almost stick an original mylar into a plotter and just let CAD print where needed, so this doesn't count as artwork.

Now those old North arrows, those are always refreshing to look at.

B+W Engineering and Design
Los Angeles Civil Engineer and Structural Engineer
http://bwengr.com | http://bwstructuralengineer.com | http://bwcivilengineer.com

We live in a world where efficiency is the number one desired trait. Fancy fonts and north arrows, in my opinion, are a waste of time. Short and to the point is what is required in a fast-paced engineering project. Some level of sacrifice needs to be made to get drawings out on time. A client can look at the artistic fonts and objects as a distraction.

MusicEngineer,

I have attached a map I drew for a hiking club. The north arrow is not a masterpiece, but it was fun, and fun is what hiking clubs are all about. It was worth taking a little time.

As with fonts, I am impressed at something somebody draws. I am not impressed at clip-art somebody finds.

One of the things I recall about working on a drafting board was that my lettering deteriorated over the weekend. By late Tuesday, I was back into it. This is stuff you cannot be good at unless you work at it constantly.

--
JHG

• http://files.engineering.com/getfile.aspx?folder=c9a9a30f-7c53-46ce-95a3-74

I was in the last mechanical engineering class to be required to do a hand-drafting class in 1998. One of the requirements was to precisely copy an alphabet in "drafting font" or whatever. That alone took most students a month to complete because the sadistic TA's took great pleasure in finding where your lines at the bottom of your "H" didn't hit the guideline. What a god-forsaken waste of time. Those dickheads didn't even give me a CAD course, I had to learn it in my first job!

If you want to do art, go do art. If you want to combine engineering and art, work with an industrial designer or an architect. The rest of us to want you to communicate your ideas legibly and quickly. I can't STAND people that bemoan the loss of hand drafting. Are you kidding me?! Let's bring back slide rules and books of logs - those were pretty awesome, right? Oh wait, I'd rather do multiplication in 0.001 seconds using the iPhone I'm using to type this.

As an engineer, my art is in the beauty and functionality of the designs I create. My clients pay me for that, and to do it quickly, not spend hours tarting up the documents I use to convey my designs.

On the other hand, the documents for today's design help to sell tomorrow's design, so a little tarting up is a good investment.

At my very first real job, being able to letter exactly like the chief draftsman was a condition of employment. The resulting drawing sets looked real nice, regardless of who drew which sheet. CAD gives you that hard-won uniformity almost for free.

CAD's easy uniformity also robs the reviewer of a useful signal about how much care went into a design.

Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

Mike,

I think that this ping-pong can go on forever Or at least until all thouse who leared to hand draft are retired.

Best regards

Morten

A point which may be fast approaching, at least it feels that way for those of us who were members of those last classes which were taught to hand letter (I still have my pencil sharpener and some erasing shields in my desk drawer).

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

John,
I think that the Pentel Pencil,in varying widths even did away for the need for that pencil sharpener.
Although I do still have some clutch pencils and a sandpaper board handy.
I am now retired, and only do this drafting thing when I feel like it.
Besides it is sooo much easier on a computer. You never have to worry about spilling your cup of coffee on the part finished sheet.
B.E.

The good engineer does not need to memorize every formula; he just needs to know where he can find them when he needs them. Old professor

berkshire,

Yon can spill coffee on your keyboard!

I did not use a 0.5mm pencil for lettering. I used a 2mm lead holder with a semi-sharp lead. Also, I used a 2mm leadholder with a very sharp 5H lead for drawing layouts.

--
JHG

Speaking of 'spilling coffee', back when I worked in the drafting office we had these light-green plastic 'pads' on the drawing boards which would really get messy with the pencil lead and just plain grim from your hands and such. Now we were provided spray bottles of so-called 'drawing board cleaner' but it was discovered, quite by accident (as it was claimed, long before I started working there) that using lukewarm black-coffee was the absolute best 'drawing board cleaner' anyone had ever found. So about once ever 3 or 4 months we would have a 'clean-up day' in the office where the janitorial staff would bring in some large trash bins and you would go through discarding any out-of-date material on your reference desk (old prints, obsolete specs, etc.), straighten out book shelves, clean-out drawers, etc. But also we would take the time to clean those light-green 'pads' on the drawing boards and I have to say, this proved to the best use of coffee that I have ever personally encountered, seeing that I've never had a cup of coffee in my life (I did have a half a cup when I was 14-years old, but that's a story for another time and place ;-)

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

John,
I will have to try that, I had never heard of that method, I just happen to have a light green pad on my board out the back.
I used to use a substance that was a first cousin to chewing gum that would pick up dirt from the drawing and or the pad.

Drawoh,
Thats the way I started, with a chisel point, making thick downstrokes and thin upstrokes, and no lettering guide, with a checker who made you re-do it if the lettering was not good enough. I also found that a very sharp 5H pencil would cut vellum if you were not careful.They worked better on Mylar.
Later I moved to another company who insisted that everybody use lettering guides,oh well.
B.E.

The good engineer does not need to memorize every formula; he just needs to know where he can find them when he needs them. Old professor

How about a 'Leroy Set'...



...which we used for the really 'critical' drawings.

We also had a "Verityper"...



...that was mostly used to 'type' parts lists onto assembly drawings (these jobs were usually given to a clerk or one of the typist on the office).

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

Now I am consumed with envy John, My Leroy set only has the leatherette case and 3 different pen sizes,instead of the wooden box, however it does have a pencil holder for a 2mm pencil lead.
The verityper I never used.
B.E.

The good engineer does not need to memorize every formula; he just needs to know where he can find them when he needs them. Old professor