My dad's old roll of plans vs. digital blueprints on an iPad

I was cleaning out my garage last weekend and found a roll of blueprints from a job my dad worked on in 1987. It was for a shopping center in Akron. Man, those things were huge and heavy. He'd have to roll them out on a table and use weights to keep them flat. Now I just pinch and zoom on an iPad (or even my phone if I'm desperate). I switched over to digital around 2015 when my GC basically told me I was wasting time if I wasn't using PlanGrid. Has anyone else made that switch and then realized they can never go back to paper?

1 comments

1 Comment

river1832d ago

Hold on, I gotta push back a little here. I still keep a set of my old paper plans in the truck for good reason. When you’re out on a job site with dirt and dust and water everywhere, an iPad is a fragile liability that needs constant babying. Drop a crescent wrench on that screen once and you’re out a thousand bucks and all your job data. Paper plans might get stained and torn, but I can still read them, and they don’t crash or freeze up when the battery dies. Plus, there’s something to be said for seeing the whole drawing at once without having to zoom in and out like a madman. I’m not saying digital has no place, but I’d never want to be 100% dependent on it.