This final semester 2 task asked me to provide a poster that showed off some of my most used commands and shortcuts in AutoCAD. This poster should not only provide some useful information but also look aesthetically pleasing. For this poster idea, I thought it would be a good idea to note down all of my most used commands and pick four of them to base the poster off. The notes for this can be seen below:
After picking my four (Enter, F8, H and CTRL 8) I needed to think of some creative ideas that would show off how these commands are used. To do this, I drew 4 sketches as well as my final poster layout that I would complete on both AutoCAD and Photoshop.
My first idea was to use the “H” command which uses the hatch tool. This tool is very commonly used to fill in areas within drawings and therefore I felt it deserved a place on this poster. I decided to actually draw up and use the hatch tool itself to make this portion of the poster so I made a rectangle and set it out accordingly:
I then used basic tools to create the final layout of the poster.
After this, I used the hatch tool to fill in all the areas of the poster and complete the first portion of the poster.
The next section was to be focused on F8. This shortcut toggles the grid mode on/off and I use this all the time to line up my drawings and make things easier to recognize. This poster was easy to make as all I had to do was create a grid using photoshop tools and fill it in using the paint bucket leading to the poster seen below.
I also felt that a shortcut I used a lot was the enter key. This key repeats the last tool used in CAD and I wanted to show this off within this poster part by inputting an element of repetition into it. I did this by simply writing “Enter = Repeat” with the text tool and copied it 11 times to fill in the area. I then changed the opacity slightly for every line of text. I was very proud of the result of this one and felt it really showed off what the tool did.
The final shortcut I wanted to show off was the calculator tool. I feel this tool is extremely underrated and I very rarely see people use it. However, I find it extremely useful when I am trying to calculate a distance when drawing objects and this tool always helps with that. I also feel not many people know about this tool and think it would be a good idea to share some exposure on it. The poster itself was rather easy to make as I based it off a calculator and wrote the command where the answer would usually show whilst using simple tools such as the rectangle and text tools to complete the calculator itself.
With all of these posters now done, I combined them all and assigned each of them to a quarter of the page and put the title in the middle. After looking at it, I decided to change the background of the enter poster to a dark blue to compliment the other colours on the page. The final product can be seen below:
