Yesterday evening I was chatting to a friend who's been doing graphic design for Skype for years and he said something like "I haven't signed up with GrabCAD yet myself but I hear it's doing great." To which I replied that it's nice of him to say that but GrabCAD is not really for graphic designers as it contains CAD models and that's a whole different universe.
Necklace-style mp3 player from w.wolf
I was quickly proven wrong and I'm glad that happened. Turns out that graphic designers would love to get their hands on some of the models we have in our library - to be used in different mock-ups they do for both print and web as they'd save time sketching an engine or even warehouse stairs. The only problem is the file format. Screenshots that are used to show off the CAD files are plain jpg-s, compressed and lack layers so a designer would spend time separating the object from the background etc.
But there's a fix, and in some cases a simple one - turns out that SolidWorks can export a .psd file format which is just what you need when you're working with Adobe software products. At which point I got really excited as this looked like a feature we didn't even think of having.
Looks like graphic designers and GrabCAD blend nicely - a simple comment with "Hi there, can you export this model in .psd and add to the model file?" will be enough in most cases. It won't work in all the cases and with all CAD software but I like the idea of seeing overlap in the work of CAD engineers and designers.
