First off, for any laptop that is going to be doing any kind of design work, you need to be getting a laptop with a dedicated graphics card. The integrated graphics options out there really just will not cut it for performance design work. If you're doing 3D modeling or really serious about your design work, then you'd best be looking into a professional graphics card as well, such as the AMD FirePro or nVidia Quadro series. These do not come cheap or in cheap laptops, so it's probably not going to fit within a $1k budget.
When you're doing design work on a laptop, you need something built for high performance work on a daily basis. Your normal off-the-shelf consumer laptops will not handle this kind of demand for long before they experience failures. Three quarters of the computers we have come in my repair shop with hardware failures are consumer laptops, they just aren't built to last.
Go with a business line laptop from Dell or HP. I'd highly recommend the HP systems, we have sold dozens of HP ProBook and EliteBook laptops, I own one of each myself, and they are bulletproof systems. Of all of these laptops we have sold over the past three years, I have not had a single one fail. Their build quality seems to be greater than similar offerings from Dell and you can get a better quality piece with more options for a similar or less price than Dell Precision series laptops.
One nice feature of several of the ProBook and the EliteBook series out if you're running plotters or CNC machines is some models still have a serial port as well. These are enterprise computers built for running this kind of work daily.
And don't just take my word on it. A couple years ago when I was at the ISA sign convention in Las Vegas, I took record of what computers the people were doing demos with throughout the convention and the majority of them were running plotters, printers, and other machines from EliteBook laptops.