Purpose of red pen

Red pen has a special status in a drawing office. It is another tool architects use for a special reason. Redlining. It is a practice of scrutinizing a printed drawing and mark up any mistakes or highlight missing information. 

If you draw on a computer screen, you might miss many things which will get obvious once you print it out. If you are thorough, there will be only small things, however still there will be some. And the first step you can do, before you start bothering other people is to redline your own work. Just the shift from a screen to paper is enough to wake you up and these small errors will show themselves.

And with the exam right around the corner, my section went through this procedure as well. So far, two teachers and six classmates left a mark on my section.

And thanks to all of them, my section looked better with every line of red they have left on it. And you can also see that the process never stops. Every person focuses on another aspect of the drawing. The things teacher point out might be missed by your classmates, who, on the other hand, see something the teacher overlooked.

And it is a great exercise for both sides. When you redline drawing of someone else,  you will learn to see things. And being observant is one of the things architects should be good at. 

And with that number of drawings printed in last few days, there were many opportunities to hone a skill of redlining. It was not unusual to see group of people hunched over a drawing, all of them pointing out different things here and there, comparing used standard for drawing or making suggestions how to improve our design.

And by this, we were all learning.  

Happy redlining

Ondrej