Reply To: New CAD utility – DRAW??

[G. Ryan Smith]

Illustrator is a fine program, no doubt – I was using that before I had even heard of DRAW. I have not been able to coax the polished effects out of DRAW that I have out of Illustrator. What frustrates me about Illustrator is that (to my knowledge) it does not have the capacity for scaled drawings – which imho Adobe should really be taken to task for not including. What I’ve run into with Illustrator is if you have the need to alter the drawing after you’ve already started in Illustrator, you have to go back and change it in AutoCAD to maintain accuracy and then re-import it into Illustrator, possibly starting essentially from scratch again. 

 

DRAW basically has a very simple and intuitive interface that allows me to jump in, crank out drawings quickly and then finish them either in that same program or export into others (Photoshop, Illustrator, Painter). The one caveat is that its CAD-like features are nowhere near as sophisticated as any CAD program, meaning that, depending on your approach, drawings with more complicated geometries may not be possible in DRAW unless you are tracing them from a scanned photo or drawing.

 

I want to be clear that I’m not arguing that DRAW is a better program than Illustrator; I actually use both of them. DRAW just has a few unique features that I think are useful for draftspersons that are almost unknown in our industry. Also, their drawing tools are more similar to CAD programs than Illustrator is.

 

What I’ve found out, actually, is that the industry that uses it a lot for drafting is the sign industry. 

 

So, it’s not for everybody, and not a be all end all. But I think it would be useful for some, so I’m offering it up here for discussion.