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The engineering and design industries are rapidly changing. Business is no longer just in your backyard: More firms compete across more markets. New technologies threaten to disrupt veteran industry players. A tough economic outlook means a smaller piece of the pie for everyone.

Guest Post: How to Make a CTB File in AutoCAD (by Brian M. Curran)

Within AutoCAD a CTB file is used for plotting, and is known as a color-dependent plot style table. This file is used to assign characteristics to objects, based on the colors of the objects. A CTB file can assign numerous characteristics to objects, but in my experience, I’ve basically just used CTB files to assign lineweights to layers, in order to get the type of drawing plots I want.

Getting the best drafting jobs - Guest Post

Are you looking for a job in the drafting field?  This article is a Guest Post from Edwin Chan (check out his website Design Establishment.) and he gives some good advice when looking for CAD or drafting work.

Getting the Best Drafting Jobs


As a designer, engineer or drafter, there are many different drafting jobs that you can do. Whether it is something you want to do full time or even something on the side for a bit of extra cash, there are many options out there to choose from. This article will look at how you can go about making yourself stand out from the other job candidates when on the job hunt.

Building Your Skill Set

Take a look at your resume and see what skills you already have that you can build on. For example, if you are a guru on AutoCAD, then picking up a similar program such as Double CAD XT or GStarICAD won’t take long and will fill out your resume more. This holds true for many different drafting and 3D modeling programs. Spending a little extra time learning these programs is a quick and easy way to build your resume up.

The Job Hunt –Get Networking

Once you’ve got a solid resume, it is time to do the searching. There are many different avenues that you can choose. The most powerful way and often the most overlooked would be getting a job through networking. A lot of people love to hire people through recommendation or through association.
Get in contact with the big players in your industry. Build networks and find mentors. Although many of these people are super busy, you will find a majority that would love to help you out. Staying in contact with people and building the relationships over time will greatly increase the chance of you getting referred to a job or being next in line when a job opening does open up. A well networked person usually never runs out of work to do.

Be Flexible

Often being able to draft well in one industry means you can use the skills you already have to jump into another. When looking for the right CAD drafting job, don’t only look for jobs within your industry. For example, if you are good at architectural drafting, then there is nothing stopping you from jumping into marine drafting or drafting schematics. Think about where you can apply your current skills into other industries. This will open up a wider pool of jobs that you can choose from.

Finding the top cad drafting jobs doesn’t have to be hard. Get connected, be flexible and find creative ways to boost your resume. This will greatly improve your chances of getting the best job for your needs.

AutoCAD Exchange: Have you stopped by lately?

Autodesk recently reworked their AutoCAD Exchange website.  If you haven't heard of it, AutoCAD Exchange is a website created by Autodesk meant to be a central online community where users of AutoCAD and AutoCAD Vertical programs can go for support and information.  Gabrielle Friedly, AutoCAD Exchange Community Manager was kind enough to write a guest post for CAD-a-Blog that discusses AutoCAD Exchange and its new features.  Here is her post:

If AutoCAD Exchange were a movie, I might invite you to “see it again for the first time.” That’s because we recently gave this popular site a new look and feel.

We launched AutoCAD Exchange in March 2009. An average of 70,000 visitors now stop by every month to access learning and productivity tools, discussions, and blog posts related to the AutoCAD® family of products. They also ask questions of colleagues, share work in the design showcase, and network with one another. Based on the feedback from these visitors, we’ve now made it easier to find, view, and experience the content that makes you even more productive with AutoCAD software. Here’s a preview of what we’ve done. 

Autodesk Labs Role - Guest Post by Scott Sheppard

Autodesk Labs Program Manager, Scott Sheppard, is our guest Blogger today.  he talks to us about Autodesk Lab's role at Autodesk, as well as some of it's history.

Autodesk Labs got its start with Shaan Hurley. Shaan was working on our Beta program back then and wished he could involve users earlier. We love our beta programs. We manage them on http://beta.autodesk.com Participants sign up, test the software, and provide feedback under a Non-Disclosure Agreement. Though from the customer perspective this is early in the release process, it’s actually closer to the end of the process in software development terms. So although beta testers may have great ideas like “Why don’t you redo this whole thing this way?”, there really isn’t time to start over from scratch. The primary emphasis of many beta programs is to learn if the software works or not. Our QA teams have already put the release through its paces, but there’s no substitute for having customers try it with their own data to ensure that something is ready to ship.

Autodesk Labs was born to involve the customer earlier in the process – where there is actually enough time to act on a suggestion like “Why don’t you redo this whole thing this way?” We are careful to call what we put on Labs “technology previews” instead of alphas or betas, because we want to ensure that there are no misconceptions about something becoming a product or making it into an existing product. We make technology previews available on Labs so people can help shape their future. Some die a quick death. For example, users were not so happy with our attempt at visual search where users could locate parts by drawing crude shapes. Others take a while to perfect but go on to greatness. Autodesk Inventor LT was on Labs for 2 years before becoming a product. Autodesk Impression was one of the first technologies to graduate from Labs. It is now a feature of AutoCAD.

As an organization within Autodesk, we have 2 roles.

1.  Our Labs team looks at industry trends and creates prototypes that attempt to turn the possible into the practical. Way back before the iPhone, we instrumented a copy of Autodesk Design Review to run on our Perceptive Pixel Multi-touch Wall. We learned a great deal about the gestures that would be appropriate for working with CAD data without a mouse or keyboard. Even further back than that, we created Project Freewheel to see if it were really possible to view 3D (not 2D, 2D was easy) CAD data on the web using just a browser. We learned a great deal about high-end graphics cards that were not common in cloud computing servers like those from Amazon EC2.

2.  Our second role is to be a service organization to the rest of Autodesk. We get technologies from various departments and help make them available via the Autodesk Labs site. Most of the items you find on Labs came from somewhere else within the company. The Labs team has worked on Project Freewheel, Project Draw, Project Showroom, ShareNow, and Project Twitch, but everything else is from another part of the company. We are happy to play this role as we encourage other parts of the company to develop their technologies by involving the customer early in the process. We also help with the mechanics of it by creating web pages, email aliases, discussion forums, etc. We also use social media (e.g. blogs, Facebook, Twitter) to get the word out. We produce monthly reports, that I loving call TPS reports in reference to Office Space, that summarize feedback and include site visitor and download statistics.

Thanks Scott for being our guest blogger today and for all of the great work that Autodesk Labs puts out.