Bear with me for a minute. I know this won’t seem like it’s CAD-related at first, but it is.

I bought a lucite sign holder with a pocket for tri-fold brochures at Staples yesterday, and while they had only the less-desirable one of the three variations in size and layout I was interested in, I bought it anyway, as I need a sample to begin prototyping a brochure presentation for one of the amateur radio events I’m involved with.

The deflect-o Web site is one of the worst product sites I have come across. The orginization of the site and the category labels for its products are poorly designed, to say the least (Don’t get me started on their use of frames.) And when I noticed the prominent “Downloads” item on the main menu, I was hoping to be presented with the most obvious thing I would want to download—a Microsoft Word or Publisher template for the sign holder, just as I would find on the Avery Web site for business card stock and other such things.

What can I download instead? Product images for some things (but not the holder I bought). Catalogs. Many of the product images are labeled as “PIC files” but turn out to be EPS files, and they simply appear as the raw source text in the browser window because the company’s Web server doesn’t have the corect MIME type set. And of the ones I have successfully downloaded, some turn out to be halfway decent vector art, others turn out to be extremely poor raster files that were obviously scanned from line art, but none of them are useful for creating content templates.

My need is simple, I’d like to design the sign and the brochure around the 4-inch pocket, and since the design of the holder is fixed, there should be no need for me and everyone else who designs content to measure the thing. Deflect-o should do this once for the benefit of all designers.

Most of you design something that needs to be marketed, and have product literature made and published. This is part of the design process, and the tools needed to create this material should be able to interact with CAD. And frankly, I hope none of you are making the same mistakes in promoting your products that this vendor is.

And product vendors need to learn that they should be providing enough documentation on their product pages for engineers and designers to easily add the products to their designs. Perhaps I will create a template and offer it to deflect-o. Should I charge them, or just give it to them under a Creative Commons, or open-source license?

My first attempt at designing the template will be in Microsoft Publisher, then I’ll try Illustrator and InDesign, but I suspect I’ll wind up using AutoCAD for some of the layout construction.