Hot take: Getting roasted by a senior drafter over my line weights was the best thing that happened to me

My first year at a firm in Portland, I handed in a floor plan and my lead drafter just pointed at my wall lines and said 'these look like worms crawling across the page.' He was right. I had zero variation between 0.2 and 0.5 mm pens. After that, I started layering my line weights strictly: 0.18 for hatching, 0.35 for objects, 0.5 for cut lines. Took me about 3 months to unlearn the bad habits but my redlines dropped by half. Has anyone else had a boss tear apart something basic that totally changed your drafting quality?

3 comments

3 Comments

angela_harris1mo ago

Dude that sounds miserable. I've been drafting for 8 years and I still use the same 0.5 for everything. Never once had a client complain about "line weight variation" on a set of plans they're gonna throw in a drawer anyway.

dakotab931mo ago

There's this old guy at our firm who still uses a 0.7 and calls it his "thick line" for elevations. Swears by it. But yeah, half the time I'm just printing out a set for a contractor who's gonna mark it up with a red sharpie anyway. Line weight aint the thing keeping houses from falling down.

laura_schmidt821mo ago

A boss getting that worked up over line weights seems a little dramatic to me. At the end of the day, you're drawing a picture of a building, not a piece of art for a gallery. Contractors are going to use their own markers on it anyway, and nobody is checking if your hatching lines are exactly 0.18 mm thick. I've seen plenty of sets drawn with a single pen that turned out just fine.