Realized I'd been scaling viewports wrong for 8 years after a senior drafter glanced at my screen

I was working on a commercial HVAC layout for a building in downtown Austin and kept getting called back for clearance issues. A guy named Dave with 30 years of experience walked by, looked at my file for 10 seconds, and asked why I was scaling the entire title block instead of using viewport scale. I felt like a complete idiot lmao. Has anyone else had a simple fix like that completely flip how you work?

4 comments

4 Comments

anthonyhunt20d ago

Did you have to redo all your old drawings after figuring that out?

elizabetha9220d ago

Redo all of them? Nah, that sounds like a huge waste of time...

alicec8615d ago

Funny you say that @elizabetha92 because I actually just heard a podcast about this exact thing. Apparently a lot of artists are going back and reworking their old pieces now that they have better tools and skills. But it wasn't about making them perfect or anything, more like studying their own growth. Kinda interesting to think about. For me, redoing everything sounds like a trap honestly. You'd just get stuck in this endless loop of fixing old stuff instead of making new things. Better to just take what you learned and apply it to the next drawing. That's progress right there.

mary_kelly15d ago

Ended up only redoing a handful that I actually cared about, the ones where I could see the original idea was solid but my skills just couldn't pull it off back then. Most of my old stuff I just left alone, they're like a time capsule of where I was at. It's actually kind of nice looking back and seeing how far I've come without trying to fix everything. Plus I found that if I spent too much time redoing old drawings, I'd just get frustrated and never make anything new.