Aeronaut does not develop CAD or pattern design software. We think that its a waste of time. There are excellent and well priced CAD programs around that can be programmed to do specialised patterning for a fraction of the cost of fully customised software.

Aeronaut does develop a wide range of plug-in tools for existing CAD software.

If there is no industry specific design software available for your work, then you need to look at CAD software and some rapid pattern development plug-in tools.

There are a million and one different CAD programs on the market and they vary in price between free and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some are used by hundreds of people and other software is used by almost everyone you meet.

In the CAD world there are some venerable CAD programs which are very popular. Oddly, this doesn't actually mean they are easy to use or very good at all! It may mean that they are in fact quite hard to learn and once somebody has learned the basics, they are too scared to try anything else.

The best CAD software that we have seen in terms of features, price, ease of use and compatibility is Vectorworks.

One of the best features of Vectorworks is its programming language. This allows the easy and therefore relatively low-cost programming of all sorts of plug-in tools. These can be anything from a simple tool to add seams to a shape to a full suite of routines for the design of cardboard boxes.

If some of the jobs you do involve products which only vary slightly in size and shape, the it is likely that some plug-in tool could convert these into parametric patterns. To design a new version, you just enter a few key dimensions and select the required options, and in a few clicks you have a pattern ready to cut. And ready to re-use next time.

Plug-in tools run within a CAD program put the power of custom software within the reach of every business, big or small.