Three years ago I was still using a drafting table with a parallel bar, last month I found my old lead holder in a box, and last week a new hire asked me what a vellum roll was.

3 comments

3 Comments

Oh man, that hits home. I still have my old lead pointer and a roll of scotch tape on a dispenser. Finding that stuff is like uncovering artifacts from a different world. It's wild how fast the whole physical drafting process just vanished.

abby1892mo ago

That old-school drafting gear is basically ancient history now.

-2

shane_wilson1mo ago

Holding onto that lead pointer and tape dispenser is like keeping a piece of your old self around, @webb.keith. One thing nobody talks about though is how drafting by hand forced you to commit to a decision. You couldn't just hit undo or zoom in on the screen. Every line had weight and purpose because fixing a mistake meant literally scraping or erasing it. That kind of deliberate thinking is something software just can't replicate. Do you ever miss that feeling of finality when the pencil hit the vellum?