Jewellery has long been entwined with ideas of emotion and romance in a way no other commodity has. It’s often seen as something timeless and unchanging throughout the centuries, made by a specialist craftsman at a wooden workbench. Whilst jewellers still lovingly make pieces of jewellery to be loved and cherished, the means by which they design pieces has somewhat changed over the years.
 
An industry in change
 
Some of the tools used by jewellers have remained virtually unchanged over the centuries, for example, many jewellers still use lost wax casting and an Archimedes drill. In addition to these traditional tools and techniques, jewellers have been using laser welding technology to weld pieces of metal with a level of precision not seen before. Computer-aided design is naturally the next step to jewellery design innovation, causing jewellers to rethink the way they design pieces.
 
The origins of CAD
 
The origin of CAD was with the American space race of the 1960s, in order to make working spacecraft. From there onwards, various industries have refined it and made smaller and more elegant tools for product design. Jewellery design is the latest industry to use it, even after fine art sculpture, but the ways jewellers can use it opens up a whole new world of possibilities.
 
How jewellers are using CAD
 
If you think about the amount of precision and accuracy demanded to create fine jewellery, it makes sense that jewellers are going to utilise CAD to maximise the chances of making designs become reality as perfectly as possible. Due to the speeds at which jewellers can design a piece using CAD, there may be a misconception that learning how to use software will make jewellery design easier, however jewellers still need the same amount of skill and training to make jewellery.
 
Jewellers can use CAD to try out new designs, seeing what a piece of jewellery will look like and how it’ll work, without having to buy in the metal and gems, and casting it. This ability to see what jewellery will look like before it’s made is CAD’s strongest asset, opening up a whole new market of affordable, yet bespoke jewellery design. Jewellers can take clients’ specifications and create amazing virtual designs all before making the piece, saving on time and money for both the craftsman and the client.
 
The future of jewellery design and CAD
 
CAD allows jewellery designers to create intensely delicate and intricate details that may be impossible any other way. Combined with other techniques and skills jewellers use, clients will be simply amazed, wondering how such a beautiful piece of jewellery is possible to make. They can also have an increased input on their designs when jewellers use CAD to design the piece, prior to casting it. With this increased design input, there are few things more romantic than a piece of jewellery that includes the ideas of a person in love.