SketchUp UK Blog

So you want to make beautiful 3D drawings, whether it’s cad for furniture design, cad for product design or cad for gardens and buildings? What exactly is cad product design, and what are the advantages of using cad software? This guide reveals everything you need to know about computer aided design, the many cool advantages of using it, plus some excellent cad product design tips and tricks to help you shine from the start. Are you ready to discover the magic of cad?

CAD for Product Design

What is computer aided design? CAD means using computers to help you create, modify, analyse and optimise a design. The product cad design software increases designer productivity, boosts design quality, helps designers improve their communications, creates clear documentation, and can even form the basis of the manufacturing process itself.

In 1957 Dr. Patrick Hanratty created the first numerical control system. The French engineer Pierre Bézier, who once worked for Renault, tinkered with the idea between 1966 and 1968, ultimately developing something called UNISURF, a system created to make designing auto parts and tools easier. This formed the basis of CAD software.

The first commercial applications of CAD for product design and industrial design were restricted to big business, mostly in the vehicle and aerospace sectors. The cost of early systems went way beyond what most companies could afford. These days CAD has evolved from creating simple 2D designs into a tool for making complex, multi-layered, hyper-real  3D images that can be consumed via a VR headset, utterly convincing and 100% accurate.  

Why do designers use cad? Cad is used for an enormous array of reasons and touches more or less every industry on earth. If it needs to be designed and made it’ll involve CAD at one stage or another, often from start to finish.

Detailed 2d and 3d drawings sit at the heart of everything. You can make stunningly real architectural designs using CAD and know exactly how much of each building material you’ll need for the real-world build. You can create workable site plans that can be easily understood and appreciated by everyone concerned, and craft the perfect engineering components for your project. You can design furniture, create textures, and animate everything to create exciting, convincing presentations. You name it, you can use CAD to design it.

Sketchup is a powerful piece of CAD software, one of the best cad softwares around. As popular furniture cad software, product design cad software and cabinet cad software it enables designers to create fantastic 3D models and then share them with other users via the 3D warehouse. But why would you want to choose cad when there’s plenty of pens and paper just waiting to be used? As it turns out there are many benefits to harnessing a great cad program for your next project.  Here are some of the advantages CAD delivers to designers.

Advantages of Using CAD

Why do product designers use CAD? The old pen and paper method takes a very long time. Making drawings by hand is time consuming. Making changes to a drawing, especially when a change has lots of complicated inter-dependencies, is even harder. Thanks to CAD you can create designs and make changes to them in record time without losing the plot.

Your drawings are not restricted to 2d representations. The 3d drawings cad allows are more real-looking, more convincing, and more fun to examine as you move around the drawing, looking at it from every angle. The powerful visualisation and modelling capabilities enhance product design quality. And human error is much less of an issue because the software carries out the potentially enormously complex  calculations for you.

Sketchup by Elmtec does all of this and more, a fabulous product CAD software package that doesn’t just give you all the 2d and 3d design functionality you could possibly need, it’s also super-fun to learn and easy to use.

Useful CAD Product Design Tips

Now it’s time for some useful CAD product design tips. Get these under your belt for even faster, more enjoyable cad adventures.

Get to grips with the basics of Sketchup

There’s an abundance of excellent free Sketchup learning tutorials, videos and courses for designers to tap into, covering every imaginable issue and project type. Combine these with the fact that Sketchup is intuitive and fun to use and you’ll be making amazing 2D and 3D product designs in no time.

Invest in Research

Research is your best friend. The early stages of a product design should involve rigorous research to determine exactly what your potential customers, users and other stakeholders need. It’s also helpful to take a good look at existing products with the same function. Can you do better?

Design for Manufacture

Designing products for manufacture requires experience and knowledge of the production process. Because mistakes can cost a lot, it’s sensible to factor them out from the beginning by designing for manufacture, something that’s supported perfectly by Sketchup.  This means considering practical design requirements, the need to design for the real world. It involves the materials used, their availability, whether they work together, the costs involved, how long they will last and more. As you can imagine it’s always wise to design with simplicity rather than complexity, something else Sketchup supports admirably.

Design for the Future

Looking ahead is the name of the game here. Product designers often consider future needs as well as current ones, future-proofing their designs as far as possible in an uncertain world. You might, for example, want to design parts that’ll work well in future projects as well as current ones.

Look and Feel

The visual elements of a design are just as important as the practical side. You’ll need to take the importance of aesthetics into account when designing products for a consumer market. It’s good to know how the exceptional 3D design and visualisation capabilities in Sketchup enable product designs to be engagingly presented, evaluated, edited and completed.

SketchUp for CAD Product Design

Now you understand the basics of the history of the CAD design system and know why it’s so much better than old-school pen and paper, maybe you’d like to test drive Elmtec Sketchup for yourself? You can visit our downloads section for loads of great tutorials and learning resources, and download our generous free 7 day trial of SketchUp Pro here. You might also enjoy a free trial of V-Ray for Sketchup, which delivers awesomely good hyper-real images with ease.

About Elmtec

Elmtec have been the UK distribution partner for SketchUp since 2010, and service a network of UK and Irish resellers. We have over 22 years’ experience within the digital design community.

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