Draw It Like a LEGO Set
Everyone in the design industry loves a 3D model. Nobody talks about the 2D drawing as the ultimate thing to create.
In the day-to-day, when we talk about Trimble's 3D modelling software, we talk about SketchUp. We don't talk about LayOut. SketchUp gets the glory: the 3D, the render, the walkthrough that makes a client lean into the screen. That's the exciting part. Then comes the part most people would rather skip: turning that model into a set of drawings someone can actually build from.
If you grew up on AutoCAD, you'll know this as paper space. You draw the 3D model in model space, and you prepare the drawings for manufacturing in paper space. In SketchUp, that software is LayOut, the most quietly ignored piece of the whole pipeline.
Here's the thing, though. As we start talking about the software, I want you to keep one idea at the forefront of your mind: the software is not the point.
The person reading the drawings is.
When you lay out a set of construction or manufacturing drawings, you keep one person in mind the whole time: the craftsman on the factory floor, or the general worker on a construction site. In South Africa, this is probably someone for whom English is a second or third language. They're working a shift. They've never met you, and perhaps they never will.
Everything you put on that sheet either helps that person or gets in their way.
And in the way architects draw for other architects, the drawing usually gets in the way. You know the ones. Five layers stacked on top of each other, each a different colour, each a different line weight. A legend to decode the colours. An amendment to the legend. A note pointing to another note. You go hunting for one dimension and it's buried three references deep, and by the time you've found it, you've lost the thread of what you were even building.
That isn't a drawing. It's a puzzle.
And the person on the other end didn't ask for a puzzle.
So we borrow from LEGO.
Open a box of LEGO and there's no legend, no colour key, no designer's ego in the way. It simply walks you through the build, one step at a time, take this piece, connect it to that one, then the next. A six or seven-year-old can follow along in any language on Earth. Every page assumes you know nothing, and shows you exactly where you came from and where you need to go next. Nothing more.
That's the standard we hold ourselves to. Not "technically complete." Understandable.
It sounds like a lowering of ambition. It's the opposite. It is much harder to make a drawing simple than to make it thorough. Thorough is just adding. Simple is deciding what the maker needs to see right now to place the next part, and having the discipline to leave everything else off the view. It's editing, and editing is always the hardest skill.
Is it easy to shoot a homemade video of a birthday? Easy. Is it harder to edit that footage into something tight enough to post and have someone actually watch? Much harder. Same with a drawing that has to work on site.
And the payoff shows up on site, where you might never see it.
Fewer questions. Fewer WhatsApps at 6pm asking what a symbol means. Fewer things built slightly wrong because someone guessed rather than admit they couldn't read the sheet. A good set of drawings is invisible, it quietly gets out of the way and lets the work get built the way it was drawn, the fixtures and the installation landing where they should.
We spend so much time and energy making a beautiful model, and then we hand over documentation that assumes the reader thinks exactly like we do. They don't. And they shouldn't have to.
The best drawing isn't the most detailed one. It's the one nobody has to decode.
#LayOut #SketchUp #RetailDesign #ConstructionDrawings #DesignSystems
