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Essential reading for Industrial Designers! Over at Coroflot's Creative Seeds blog, Carl Alviani explores the relationship between software packages and your career. Are you limited by the programs you know? Is your career? Are your designs? Here's a taste:

Although there's a common saying in the Industrial Design community that "CAD is just another tool," and a truly skilled designer uses whatever tool is necessary and appropriate, it's quietly understood by many that your CAD package speaks forcefully about what kind of designer you are. Anyone familiar with the field will already be aware of a sort of crude continuum of "real ID": parametric solid modelers (Pro/E, SolidWorks, CATIA, Unigraphics) are for engineers, and by extension, designers who are really just engineers that don't do math; surface modelers (Alias and Rhino) are for "creatives" who can't be bothered with manufacturability; and if you're a Real Designer, you can do everything that needs doing with a bin of pens and markers. It's an invented hierarchy that leads to endless pissing contests about sketching skills, but considerably fewer about modeling skills: the stereotypical hot Alias jockey is still more self-effacing technician than rock star, and Pro/E and SolidWorks don't even really have "jockeys," just users.

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