CAD and Why It’s Important for Your Design

At MAKO Design + Invent, we believe that it is important for our clients to fully understand and have full transparency about all the steps that go into making their products and product designs.

In the creation of inventions and innovative product designs, an important step is moving from a generic idea or sketch to a fully designed CAD model. Upon hearing this, most inventors not familiar with industrial design are probably confused as to what a CAD model is and why it is even required at all for creating their product.

If you plan on creating a product or hope to see your product come to life at all, you will encounter having to go through the CAD phase for sure. Our blog will explore defining what CAD is and why it is important to your design, as well as highlighting the important benefits of using CAD for your design.

What is CAD and Why is it Important for Your Design?

Once a designer acquires a concrete idea of what they are requested to create, they usually sit and take a good amount of time to brainstorm ideas about how they imagine the product to look and function like. Once the designers narrow down the best ideas and sketches of how they envision the product, they move from simple design sketches to creating CAD models.

CAD stands for Computer-Aided Design, and like the name entails, CAD is essentially the use of computers through a type of software in order for designers use to create drafts and models of product designs. CAD is important for your design because not only can it be used to visualize 2D and 3D designs, but CAD also allows the designer to design things using technical drawings that require detailed measurements.

Designers typically need to use different tools and mathematical equations in order to properly use CAD softwares’ as using and creating CADs usually outline the manufacturing processes needed for the design by outlining the products materials, processes, tolerances and dimensions.

Below is a list of some of the best reasons of why using CAD is exceptionally critical to creating your product design.

The Benefits of Using CAD for Your Product Design

High-Quality Designs

By far one of the biggest reasons why CAD is so popular and preferred when creating designs in the product design and engineering world is because of how much using CAD to create designs makes for high quality designs.

This is mainly due several different reasons, but among the top reasons, CAD designs make it easier for designers and engineers to create their designs with a less chance in encounter any percentage error in their designs because of the use of better tools.

CAD designs allow for the creation of extremely accurate designs because the software allows for 3D rotation in its design creation. This also makes it handy for designers to clearly point out to clients any technical details about the product design.

CAD is important for your design because by using CAD, the software also provides designers with the right tools to measure precision, skill and accuracy in their designs, whereas if the design was being made on paper it would have been indefinitely harder to precisely measure or design the right measurements and accuracy needed in their designs due to the scale of how different paper is in comparison to a CAD software.

Increased Productivity

Hands down, one of the most important reasons why using 3D CAD designs has become so preferred amongst designers and engineers is the definite increase in productivity. There are a couple of great reasons why CAD software’s allow for an increase in productivity and this is because of how easy using CAD allows for designers and engineers to save time.

In this case, CAD is important for your design because in comparison to non-computer aided made designs, designing through a software design is more time efficient and allows the designer to create more efficient designs in shorter amounts of time.

A big reason why saving time allows for an increase in productivity for the designer is because it is easier to edit or change the design digitally through CAD rather than if it was through traditional methods.

Easier to Read & Communicate Through

When creating a product, it is always important for there to be clear communication between the designer, engineer, and the inventor. Although the designer and engineer might be able to have a clear understanding of how design and functionality can work together to make a working product, it might not be as clear to the inventor.

With this being said, CAD is important for your design, because CAD designs make for more clear designs, its easier for designers to communicate the build of the product design to the inventor in comparison to if they were to try to communicate drawings on a pencil or paper.

Sharing

Working with a big team of designers is always exciting for inventors because it means you get to work and acquire different perspectives, skills, and design ideas for your product. If your team of designers are all working together to create your product, CAD is important for your product design since CAD makes it easier for designers and collaborators to easily share design files and work with each other seamlessly.

CAD software also tracks the history of changes made to design files so designers can see the history of what another designer has added or changed to clearly see where the direction of the design is headed, and also point out and possible liabilities in the build of the design or mistakes.

Documenting Design

The final advantage of using CAD is that CAD software and design are great for communicating designs to manufacturers through how well CAD software creates and documents the data for documenting the design. This includes the data for how the manufacturing of the product will take place, which includes the product and component drawings, materials for making the design, components, dimensions and shape.

Because of this, CAD is important for your design, not only is the fact that it has a great capability for communication between manufacturers but also because it is so easy to document and save the design data for different parts of the drawing, designers can save certain components so that they don’t need to be designed repeatedly. Not only is this overall efficient for the designer but saves a lot of tine.

Conclusions on CAD

It’s important to stay informed about all aspects of design when thinking of entering the world of design and invention. Understanding what CAD is and why CAD is important for your design will allow for an easier understanding and communication with any team of designers or engineers in today’s realm of design.

By familiarizing yourself with what CAD software can do, you can set clear expectations with what you’d expect your design draft to look like and include and will have an easier time being able to collaborate and share your design.

The high-quality tools and capabilities of the software have definite better advantages that traditional methods of sketching and creating designs and should be taken to full advantage of when given the chance.

If you have a great new invention and you’d like to learn more about this process, get in touch with MAKO today and visit our website to find out more. Or feel free to give us a call at 1-888-MAKO, and we can set you up on a call with our product strategist!

About: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop-shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories. Also, our founder Kevin Mako hosts The Product Startup Podcast, the industry's leading hardware podcast. Check it out for tips, interviews, and best practices for hardware startups, inventors, and product developers. Click HERE to learn more about MAKO Design + Invent!