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:
“In middle life, the human back is spoiling for a technical knockout and will use the flimsiest excuse, even a sneeze, to fall apart.”
—E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)
“For later in the vast gloom of cities, only there you learn
How the ideas were good only because they had to die,
Leaving you alone and skinless, a drawing by Vesalius.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)