Imagine going on a job interview for a CAD-related position and when your perspective employer asks if you have any samples of your work, you say "Sure! Launch AutoCAD!" or "You bet! Go to the Autodesk Web site".
One of my responsibilities at Autodesk is to collect customer drawings for use in marketing and training material. These drawings come from people like you, working on real design projects. The drawings we collect are used for various purposes around the world including posters, brochures, courseware, tutorials, sample drawings, software demonstrations, the Autodesk Website, you name it! I love it when I travel abroad and see drawings that I collected being used in Japanese AutoCAD brochures, German training material, and French AutoCAD sample files. Last year we received a great data set from Rodrigo, a former architectural student in Mexico. The drawings he and his partners produced can be seen in AutoCAD related material around the world including Webcasts and the Customer Stories.
Your drawings don't have to be elaborate models or from a particular industry. We need drawings of every type and from any industry
So, if it is so easy to become a CAD superstar by submitting your drawings, why isn't everyone doing it? There is a catch... a legal one. The owner of the drawings must sign our legal release form before we can use the drawings publicly. We understand that some drawings contain information that should not be made public. However, when we include the drawings in AutoCAD, Websites, or anywhere else, we can't control where they might end up. Thus, we need full permission to use them. If your drawings contain data that you can't share, you can remove the data before submitting them. We have received drawings from large and small customers around the world. For AutoCAD Release 14, we received drawings for London's Heathrow Airport... imagine that! They modified the drawings to remove information that might be considered a security risk. For AutoCAD 2000, we received 4 CD's of drawings from the World EXPO '98 in Lisbon Portugal. For AutoCAD 2004 we received a set of floor plans for an office remodel in Denver, Colorado. These drawings and the many others that we have received from large and small firms, government agencies, educational institutions, students, and individual users are what enable us to produce realistic and meaningful training and marketing material.
Because I work on the AutoCAD team, I am specifically interested in plain AutoCAD drawings. However, I would be more than happy to pass along any other drawings (ADT, MDT, Revit, Inventor, etc) to the appropriate people on those teams. At this time, I am especially interested in finding drawings that include AutoCAD geometry and corresponding table information. For example, maybe you have a civil drawing that uses lines and arcs to represent piping and it includes a table or Excel spreadsheet to show the total length of the pipe, cost per unit of length, total cost, pipe description, etc. This is just one example from one industry but I’m interested in any similar data from any industry.
If you are interested in submitting drawings (wouldn’t this be a great project for a design school?), please contact me directly. I will be glad to answer questions or review your drawings (maybe in DWF format) prior to you “officially” submitting them. I’ve posted the Consent Release Form under the Documents section of my blog.
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