Can symbols speed up your design process?

If you’re anything like me you’re always looking for ways to speed up your drawing and design process. Now I don’t mean to the extent of sacrificing good work for an extra 20 minutes in the pub! I mean tips, tricks or techniques to create the same detailed or beautiful designs but without the stresses and monotony you may have become accustomed to. There are lots of techniques I’ve found over the years that have stopped me pulling my hair out and the one that has become part of my daily routine more than any other is using Symbols.

So what are symbols? and how can they be used in your design process? Well its pretty simple really, although it sort of depends on what type of design you are working on.

A symbol is a drawn object or even a piece of text you use to depict something on your work, for example a topographical map might show a piece of countryside with a church or pub on it, but this won’t be a photograph of the roof of the building, no no it will instead be a small icon or symbol of say a cross or maybe a pint glass to tell the reader what is there. That is one example of a symbol, it could also be an open door way on a floor plan to show the reader the swing of the door or maybe a circuit board design with batteries and LED symbols. In a nut shell symbols are used to give a new level of detail to a drawing quickly.

“How is drawing more objects on my design going to save me time” I hear you cry, well this is where the great trick comes in. Many CAD softwares, such as MacDraft, allow you to store your symbols in a library. This library could be named floor plans and you can throw all of your doors, windows, furniture, lighting, outlets etc in there. Again it sounds like a lot of drawing doesn’t it? Well it isn’t I promise! Lets say the floor plan you’re working on has 15 doors on it, you don’t want to draw a door 15 times right? So draw the door once and add it to your library, now whenever you need another door just drag it back out of the library into the document and there it is, then another and another and another! Below is a quick step by step guide on creating a new library in MacDraft Pro.

The big benefit of libraries is that depending on your occupation or use you will probably find yourself drawing a lot of the same symbols across multiple designs, an electrician for example is more likely to be drawing schematics 90% of the time and an illustrator maybe technical illustrators, so they will have their own specific symbols. The library palette in MacDraft makes your symbols available for ANY document. That door I mentioned earlier? That can now be used in unlimited drawings an unlimited number of times. Over time your library will have big doors, small doors, round doors, square doors any door you’ve ever needed and will never have to draw any of them again. They can be used in any drawing and combined with templates (i’ll get into that in the next article!) your drawing time will be halved I promise!

Libraries are so unbelievably powerful and so unbelievably underrated. You could even group your items together and save them as a single item, drag them into a new document and ungroup them to use them individually. Not only does MacDraft utilise this library palette well it also provides you with purchasable library content, so in a way, you never have to draw anything again! Try using symbols in your next project, if your CAD app doesn’t have a library then don’t panic, you could create a new document and copy & paste your items into it, as long as you end up with all of your symbols in one place you are on the right track.

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