Technical drawing, also known as drafting or draughting, is the act and discipline of composing plans that visually communicate how something functions or has to be constructed. Drafting is the visual language of industry and engineering. A drafter, draftsperson, or draughtsman is a person who makes a drawing (technical or otherwise). A professional drafter who makes technical drawings is sometimes called a drafting technician.
People who communicate with technical drawings, (those who design and those who are tradespeople), may use technical standards that define practical symbols, perspectives, units of measurement, notation systems, visual styles, or layout conventions. These enable a drafter to communicate more concisely by using a commonly understood convention. Together, such conventions constitute a visual language, and help to ensure that the drawing is unambiguous and relatively easy to understand.
This need for unambiguous communication in the preparation of a functional document distinguishes technical drawing from the expressive drawing of the visual arts. Artistic drawings are subjectively interpreted; their meanings are multiply determined. Technical drawings are understood to have one intended meaning.
Famous quotes containing the words technical and/or drawing:
“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”
—J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967)
“When a subject is highly controversial ... one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)