Scale Drawing – Learning the Basics

Scale drawings are created to allow you to plan the space and for others to know and understand your plan.  

Contractors that may be working under your instruction need plans to understand where and how you want items placed.  Clients will need to visualise the space and be confident that it’s going to work for them before committing to the proposed design and You as the designer, also need to be sure that your proposal is going to work.  How embarrassing would it be to order a £15000 bed only to find it doesn’t fit the space!

As mentioned elsewhere on this site there are online tools to help you with the planning, but you will still need to ensure that the measurements you use are correct.

A scale drawing is a drawing that shows an actual space with accurate sizes except they have all been reduced or enlarged by a certain amount (called the scale). Scale is shown as the length in the drawing, then a colon : then the matching length of the actual space. 

For example if a drawing has a scale of “1:10”, anything drawn with the size of “1” would have a ‘real’ size of “10” in the real world, so a measurement of 150mm on the drawing would be 1500mm in the room.

Interior designers use 2 scale’s predominantly – the 1:50 scale and the 1:20 scale and we use a scale ruler to complete our drawings.