fsincox ... I have a personal story to tell you. ...Back in 1976 after I had gotten out of the Army, I already had a Jr. College degree in drafting and I had gotten my first job as a piping draftsman. I had a very formal drafting education, and part of that were afew graphic design courses. One of my first job as a piping draftsman was to detail out a tank appurtenance drawing …this tank wasn’t more then an over sized trash can. But I was trying to do a good job, and in my "infinite wisdom", decided I could make this drawing better by adding shading under each nozzle! It looked GREAT! I wanted to take it home and hang up on the wall! But then I handed it to my boss he told me to set down and we’d go over it. …So with a large red ink marker he proceeded to X out every bit of shading I had done! With red ink on the original it ruined the drawing. I didn’t say anything; I was disappointed because in my mind I was trying to do “good”. He could see I was alittle upset so he took the time to explain. He told me what I did looked great, but it wasn’t per any drafting standard, and that if any body else tried to use this drawing after me, that he couldn’t be sure if they had the talent to do as well as I did. He went on to explain that drawings needed to follow standards and accepted convention, but they needed to be as SIMPLE as possible so it could be assumed that the next draftsman down the road would have no problems using the same drawing to add or remove any modifications required. To be honest that “lesson” took afew years to sink in, but I never tried to shade anything again.
The lesson, that it seem almost everybody has lost, is drawings STILL need to be as simple as possible to insure that just about any body can use them down the line! Two axioms that just about says it all are as follows”
“NOTHING is make better by making it more complicated”!
The other lesson written between the lines here is…
”IF good work is not recognized, then poor work will follow!”