Line color

[fsw]

We are a cabinet shop that produces only about 2-3 pages of drawing for a specific item (kitchen, wall unit...). Any disadvantage to drawing all in one color. At most, we only use about five layers currently. We are new users, and haven't warmed up to the black screen with various colors. Are we making a mistake with a white screen and all black lines?

[Wanderer]

We are a cabinet shop that produces only about 2-3 pages of drawing for a specific item (kitchen, wall unit...). Any disadvantage to drawing all in one color. At most, we only use about five layers currently. We are new users, and haven't warmed up to the black screen with various colors. Are we making a mistake with a white screen and all black lines?FSW, I'm going to move this from the ACAD2006 forum to this one, as I believe it will be better served here. If you peruse this forum, you'll likely come up with similiar questions.
Welcome to the augi forums. :)

[Ken.Leary]

For what is worth. There's no law dictating colors on your drawing or how you set up your screen colors. Most of my architect friends like the white background, I'm partial to black.

The reason AutoCAD has colors is for ease of viewing and diseminating between different types of objects in a drawing. Use it to your advantage, exparament and come up with something you like.

I would suggest brighter colors on your screen for thicker lines and greys or darker colors for thin ones.

Do you have a color table yet or are you using a standard AutoCAd one?

[fsw]

I am using the default autocad colors. While I do have a color plotter,I don't want to print my drawings with different colors. I am torn between printing in monochrome or simply drawing with black lines on a white screen and using shades of grey or black as thinner shadow or detail lines. I assumed most people printed in monochrome. Thanks for the input.

[Brian Myers]

We are a cabinet shop that produces only about 2-3 pages of drawing for a specific item (kitchen, wall unit...). Any disadvantage to drawing all in one color. At most, we only use about five layers currently. We are new users, and haven't warmed up to the black screen with various colors. Are we making a mistake with a white screen and all black lines?

There is a rule of thumb when it comes to company standards:

"If it works well for you without mistakes being made then don't worry about it."

Color is good for (mainly) three things in a 2D environment... telling if you have objects on the right layer; printing line weights (this isn't a necessity anymore like it was in the "old" days); and being able to tell things apart.

In your case, if the above are not issues then using one color should be fine! I mostly use color anymore to simply tell everything apart (as my drawings sometimes get very busy) and to make sure I have my layering correct (which effects the way my plots look).

You can still use color lines and not print using Monochrome, but it depends on your version of AutoCAD how to set that up the way you like.