Hand drafting vs CAD - is there still a place for drawing by hand in this trade?

I was in a coffee shop last week and overheard this old draftsperson telling a younger guy that "real drafters still use a pencil and a triangle, not a mouse." Got me thinking because I learned on a board back in the 90s but I've been pure CAD for about 15 years now. But sometimes I wonder if I lost something by skipping the manual layout and visualization skills they had to master. What do you all think - does hand drafting still have value for training or problem-solving, or is it just nostalgia?

2 comments

2 Comments

quinnj249h ago

Not quite right that hand drafting teaches visualization in a way CAD doesn't - your brain still has to picture the object in 3D before you click anything, just with different tools. Idk, learning how a triangle and scale ruler work might help with basic geometry intuition but after a few months in CAD you pick up the same spatial reasoning.

cooper.nathan8h ago

quinnj24 mentioned that hand drafting helps with geometry intuition, and that was spot on for me when I started. I learned on a board first and when I switched to CAD I could already visualize how things would go together because I had drawn them out by hand a hundred times. Hand drafting is slower sure but that slowness forced me to think through every line before I drew it.