How to make IKEA-style assembly instructions from CAD

"IKEA-style" has become shorthand for a particular kind of instructions: line drawings, a parts page at the front, numbered steps, and almost no words. The reason for leaving the words out is practical. One booklet then serves every market, with nothing to translate and no text to keep in step with the pictures. The same reasoning is behind pictograms in general:

The cost is that the drawings have to do all the work. A sentence can say "the short screws, not the long ones"; a wordless step has to show it. The method below is the general method for assembly instructions, tightened for pictures alone.

1. Decide whether wordless is right for this product

• Good fits: furniture and other flat-pack products, kits, small machines a customer assembles once, and anything sold in several countries.
• Poor fits: steps that depend on a setting, a torque, a sequence of switches or a judgement ("until it runs smoothly"). Those need numbers or words, and a picture that pretends otherwise will be misread.
• Warnings never go wordless by default. Safety information is the manufacturer's to write, from its own risk assessment, and it often needs words.

2. Start with a parts page

The first page shows every part the customer will handle, each drawn on its own with its quantity and a number. This is where repeated parts stop being a source of mistakes, so count them from the CAD assembly, not from memory, and draw similar parts at the same scale so the difference shows. Many wordless manuals draw screws and dowels at full size, so the reader can hold one against the page.

Give each part one number and use it everywhere: on the parts page, in every step, and on any spares list. The CAD file name is no use to the reader; the number is.

3. Find a build order a person can follow

The order of the CAD tree is the order the model was drawn in. A buildable order usually runs the other way from taking it apart: whatever comes off first goes on last. Exploded views exist for exactly this:

Start from the part that sits on the floor or the bench and build upwards and inwards. Fasteners belong in the step with the part they fix, never before it.

4. One action per picture

• Show only the parts added in this step, moving into place along the axis they fit on, with a thin trail line back to where they go.
• Draw what is already built in a lighter, thinner line, so the eye goes to the new parts. Leave out parts that come later.
• Put the quantity next to the part: "4×" beside one drawn screw says more than four screws drawn small.
• Keep the viewpoint still from step to step, and change it only when the reader has to turn the work over. Then show it being turned.
• Leave hidden lines out. In instructions they are noise.

5. Say the rest with symbols, sparingly

Wordless manuals still need a few symbols: a tick and a cross for right and wrong, a magnified circle for a detail, a click mark, two figures for a two-person lift. Draw each once, use it the same way every time, and explain none of them in words, because the point is that they need no explaining. If a step needs a paragraph to be understood, add the paragraph: a wordless manual with one sentence in it is better than one that is misread.

The international standard for instructions, IEC/IEEE 82079-1:2019, covers this kind of product too. Its abstract says:

6. Make the pictures from the CAD

Redrawing every step by hand is how most wordless manuals used to be made, and it is why they drift from the product. Drawing them from the CAD keeps them true. In FreeCAD 1.0 you can build an exploded view per step in the Assembly workbench, place each on a TechDraw page and use TechDraw → Page → Export Page as SVG; the line weights and the ghosting of earlier parts are then yours to set.

7. Test it on someone who has never seen the product

Hand the booklet and a box of parts to someone who didn't design it, and watch without helping. Every hesitation marks a picture that needs another view, a larger detail or a clearer quantity. Wordless instructions fail quietly, so the only reliable test is watching someone use them.