Designing Drafter, from the product to the pitch deck

What I’ve made

On a team of 10, everyone covers a lot of ground. I designed everything customers buy from Drafter and most of what people see of the company, working closely with our founders and engineers. Here are the main pieces, grouped by what they’re for.

The product

Hardware teams at companies like Viasat and Gravitics use Drafter to make their drawings. Engineers sign those drawings. If a tolerance is wrong, a part gets scrapped or fails in the field, and the name on the drawing is theirs. Some customers also work with export-controlled (ITAR) data. So Drafter has to earn trust on every screen, and it has to be fast enough to be worth changing old habits for.

Here are a few recent pieces I’m proud of, and what each one taught us.

Blueprints

Our first workflow drew the whole drawing from the context the engineer gave us. Blueprints does 50 to 70% of it much faster, then hands it to the engineer to finish their way.

It turned our product direction on its head. We had underestimated how much speed matters to engineers. We shipped it in September 2026, and in early testing, engineers used Drafter more with it.

Meeting engineers in their CAD

At first we believed that if Drafter got the drawing right, it wouldn’t need to go back into the engineer’s CAD tool. Talking with engineers about how they actually work showed us we were wrong. So we built native integrations with SOLIDWORKS and NX.

Notes

Engineers paste the same notes onto drawing after drawing: tolerances, finishes, heat treatments. It’s an unglamorous problem, and a real chance to improve on how engineers handle notes today. Notes suggests the ones that fit each part’s material, finish, and process, and the engineer decides what goes on.

Showing the work

When we were moving fast early on, we shipped a screen where an engineer could sit on a loading wheel for a minute or two while Drafter made their drawing. We came to see that wait as a chance to show the work. Now it’s a live stream, with each callout appearing as Drafter places it.

I’ve watched this moment on a hundred demo calls. Engineers see how fast the work happens, and they understand how much time it saves them. When software does this much of someone’s work, it has to bring them along.

Saying what it couldn’t do

Drafter does a lot of work for the engineer, and it won’t do all of it equally well. So it says so up front. In the bill of materials, a badge counts the parts that need review, and each part is marked ready, needs review, or failed. Where Drafter is less certain, it asks the engineer a question or suggests an action, so a person checks exactly the parts that need checking.

For each part, a Critical Features panel shows the features Drafter treats as critical to function, like a hole or a mating surface. The engineer can see them and change them. Both are in the demo at the top of this page.

Moving callouts

In CAD tools today, you move a callout by dragging it from one shape to another yourself. In Drafter, you drag it to another view, and only the views where it’s allowed will take it. As you drag, each view shows whether it’s a good place for that callout.

Drafter does the thinking about where a callout can go, and the engineer still decides where it goes. It ships to customers in October.

The marketing site

I designed and built the new drafterinc.com with Claude Code in about three weeks. It launched in September 2026.

Claude Code let me build things I couldn’t before: complex animation, interactive demos of the product, and far more pages. I made a page for each industry we serve and a library of engineering resources. We also folded the Toolbox, which had been its own site, into the main one, so the two help each other in search.

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How I work

I design in code. I moved our design work out of Figma and into the codebase with Claude Code, and the coded prototype became the company’s source of truth for how the product looks and behaves. When I change the product’s UI, I make the change with Claude Code and open a pull request, and one of our engineers reviews it before it merges. I built this site with Claude Code too; the colophon has the details.

My role goes past design. I help set the roadmap, run demo calls, onboard new customers, and answer their support questions. That’s how I hear what’s working from the people using it. When a demo goes well, it sometimes turns into a sales call.

So that feedback doesn’t get lost, we built a portal for it. An agent sits in on our customer calls, takes notes on product feedback, and sorts it into a dashboard we use to set priorities and run customer success.

Reaching engineers

I grew the newsletter to 20,000+ subscribers, mostly through posts I made from Drafter’s accounts on X, LinkedIn, and Reddit. One became the top post of all time on r/MechanicalEngineering. I write and design every issue, and it goes out under our CEO’s name.

The Toolbox, Drawing Redliner, and the quick drawing tool bring engineers in through search. With the product, they reach 50,000+ engineers. I also designed a GD&T cheat sheet that we sell as a poster and a desk mat, and we’ve filled close to a thousand orders.

What’s next

What I’m designing next at Drafter isn’t public yet. If you have the password, it’s here. If not, email me and I’ll walk you through it.