Douglas R. Seidler

The prime objective of Digital Drawing for Designers: A Visual Guide to AutoCAD is to provide designers a visual, clear, and concise guide to better understand the world of Digital Drawing as it relates to AutoCAD. While there are many AutoCAD books on the market, most are thick with technical language and excessive technical discussions about the software. In my experience, many discussions in these books use inconsistent language or complicated instruction to teach relatively simple tasks. These books also require the learner to choose which information is essential to understand AutoCAD, something that poses a great challenge to many students. After teaching digital drawing at Suffolk University for several years, I recognized that Architects and Interior Designers need better AutoCAD instruction.

Recent educational research suggests that students gain a stronger understanding through instruction with specific and transparent learning objectives. In addition, the research suggests that understanding is easier to attain when learning connects to a body of knowledge that the student already understands. For AutoCAD, the existing body of knowledge seemed obvious: manual drafting.

The combination of my in-class teaching experience and this educational research inspired me to develop and write supplemental course material that better communicates the relationship between AutoCAD and manual drafting. You can click here to see an example of how I introduce drawing horizontal and vertical lines (the Ortho parameter). Through this new approach to teaching AutoCAD, I found that my student’s enthusiasm and general understanding of AutoCAD increased exponentially. This supplemental course material became the foundation for this book. I wrote Digital Drawing for Designers to share this new teaching approach with Architects and Interior Designers in colleges and universities across the country.

more: books.dougseidler.com