Professional Development with Visio® 2000

Concepts: Design Versus Drafting

I feel it very important that I make a point here: Drawing with graphic primitives creates a picture, and drawing with objects creates a model. Drawing with graphic primitives is called drafting, and drawing with objects is called designing.

Here, I'm going to admit a bias—I was trained as an architect and tend to lean toward architectural examples and illustrations to drive a point home. Consider the example of a construction project, commercial or residential (it doesn't matter). When the architect draws up a set of drawings and prints them on blue-line paper, he creates what he refers to as construction documents. The building contractor who receives a set of these documents (drawings) takes many things for ...