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An alternative to outsourced drafting

An Alternative to Outsourced CAD Drafting Services

Firms send drafting out when the work outgrows the team: an offshore production group, a contract drafter, or a partner firm that picks up sheets during a crunch. Those arrangements work, and they also come with onboarding to your standards, rounds of markups across time zones, and project files leaving your systems. Nomic is another source of drafting capacity that works on your own files in your CAD standards, clouds everything it drew, and checks its work before your team reviews.

Start for freeAll drafting work
Last reviewed: November 2026

You send

  • The drafting scope you would normally send out
  • Architectural backgrounds and your current DWGs
  • Your CAD standards file, block library, and title block
  • Markups, sketches, or design criteria from your engineer

Nomic hands back

  • DWG files on your layers, blocks, and title blocks
  • Clouds and tags on everything Nomic drew or changed
  • Plotted PDFs ready for your team to review
  • A list of open questions and unreadable markups
1234567ABCW21x44W21x44W21x44W16x2618K5 @ 5'-0" O.C.TOP OF STEEL EL. 128'-6" | 3" COMPOSITE DECK + 3-1/4" LW CONC.27'-3"27'-0"27'-3"27'-3"27'-0"27'-3"94'-8"1AFRAMING PLANSCALE: 1/8" = 1'-0"N1234CONSULTING ENGINEERSREVISIONS1ISSUED FOR REVIEWPROJECTCEDAR LOFTSSCALE1/8" = 1'-0"DATE03/01/2026KEY PLANSHEET TITLEFRAMING PLANSHEET NUMBERS-201

On the sheet

Framing Plan, annotated

A structural framing plan with columns on the grid, girders, infill beams, and the lateral system.

  1. 1Steel column at each grid intersection
  2. 2Girder on the grid line, sized on plan
  3. 3Joists with spacing and span arrow
  4. 4Moment connection in the lateral frame

The problem

Outsourced sheets come back close, then go around again

A good outside drafting team can turn a markup set overnight, but the first few rounds on a new client usually come back with the wrong layer names, a text style that is almost right, symbols from a generic library, and a title block filled from the wrong field. That is an onboarding problem more than a skill problem, because half of a firm's standards live in habits nobody wrote down. The project engineer redlines the standards issues along with the design issues, the sheets go back, and each round adds a day of handoff and another PDF of markups to keep track of.

There is also the file question. Sending backgrounds, the client's title block, and the firm's standards to an outside party means a file transfer outside your document system, a nondisclosure agreement, and sometimes an owner who asks where their drawings went. On a data center, healthcare, or government project, that answer can decide whether outsourcing is allowed at all.

01 / Standards

Your standards on the first pass

Nomic reads your CAD standards file, block library, title blocks, and past projects before it draws, so the first DWG comes back on your layers with your symbols and text styles. Review rounds go to the design questions your engineer cares about, and the standards redlines that make up the first rounds with a new outside team mostly drop away.

  • Layers, blocks, line types, and text styles from your standards file
  • Details and notes that follow how your firm drew them before
  • Title blocks filled in from the project sheet index
02 / Turnaround

Markups picked up the same day

Attach the scanned or Bluebeam markups and Nomic edits the DWGs, clouds each change, and flags any mark it cannot read, usually the same day. There is no overnight handoff, so a markup round that would take a day with an outside team can happen several times between morning and the end of the day.

  • Hand and Bluebeam markups read and drafted in the DWG
  • Every change clouded and tagged for back-checking
  • Illegible or ambiguous marks listed instead of guessed
03 / Security

The files stay in your systems

Nomic reads backgrounds and standards in place from the document systems you connect, such as SharePoint, Egnyte, Autodesk Forma, Bentley ProjectWise, and more, and saves the DWGs it draws to the project. Nomic is SOC 2 Type II, and your project files are not sent to an outside drafting party to get the work done.

  • Backgrounds and standards read in place from connected systems
  • SOC 2 Type II controls over access and handling
  • Each firm runs in its own environment

Checked against

The code and documents behind every sheet

Name the editions the project is designed to and Nomic checks its own drawing against them before handing it back. Your engineer or architect of record makes the final call and stamps the set.

  • Your firm CAD standards and block library
  • The markups and sketches from your engineer or architect
  • The code editions the project is designed to
  • SOC 2 Type II controls

How it works

From a sentence to a stamped set

  1. Step 1

    Ask for the drawing

    Say what the sheet needs to show and attach the backgrounds, markups, cutsheets, or photos. A sentence is enough to start.

  2. Step 2

    Nomic drafts it in CAD

    Nomic works in CAD on its own computer, on your layers and blocks, following how your firm drew the same thing before. It saves real DWG files to the project.

  3. Step 3

    Nomic checks its own work

    The drawing is checked against the code editions you name and the source documents. Everything Nomic drew is clouded, and open questions are listed.

  4. Step 4

    Your team reviews and stamps

    Your engineers and architects review the clouded changes, make the final call, and issue the set under their own stamp.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

For some scopes it can be an alternative, and for others an outside team is still the better fit. Nomic is strong at plans, layouts, details, schedules, and redline pickup in DWG on your standards. Work that needs people in a Revit model, or a team that will attend coordination meetings for you, is still better handled by drafters, in house or outsourced.

An offshore team can work while your office sleeps, which is a real advantage on large overnight packages. Nomic usually turns a drafting request or a markup round the same day with no handoff, so several review rounds can fit in one day.

Nomic reads files in place from the document systems you connect, such as SharePoint, Egnyte, Autodesk Forma, Bentley ProjectWise, and more, and is SOC 2 Type II. Your files are not sent to a third-party drafting firm to do the work, and each firm runs in its own environment.

Your team does, the same way you would review sheets from a contract drafter. Everything Nomic drew is clouded, it lists its open questions, and the engineer or architect of record makes the final call and stamps.

No. Nomic saves DWG files and change lists. A modeler on your team or your outside partner can link those into the Revit model.

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