“Redlines” is the word used in an architectural office to reference the red ink that is typically used to mark up corrections that need to be made on architectural drawings. Is this phrase outdated? Do people even use red anymore? Does the experience send some into some form of post-traumatic stress disorder?
There is a downside to how maniacal you can get with your redline process. I worked in an office – it was a good office and I still have a lot of respect for the people who run and manage that place – but one of the partners was an absolute working machine and he would come up to the office on weekends, stay late and night all the time, and redline the drawing of the younger staff. He wanted you to highlight the changes and modifications that you made in real-time … pick something up, then highlight it as done. One at a time, Back and Forth. And he wanted everyone to save his original redlined drawings so that he could check to make sure that you actually picked up all the redlines he had put on the page. All I can say is that if you had highlighted a redline but not actually picked it up, you might get murdered. He was not wrong in being irritated at this sort of mistake, but he had a fiery attitude, and people were scared of making him angry. As these behaviors played out, people would pick up every single redline on the page without actually thinking about what they were doing or why? What could have been a fantastic teaching tool turned into one of the worst.
