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Michael Wilson/5 min read

Creating an Effective Floor Plan Graphic Legend: A Step-by-Step Guide

Floor Plan Legend Checklist

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The first thing that I want to do here is create a Floor Plan Graphic Legend.

The first thing that I want to do here is create a Floor Plan Graphic Legend. And this is a good way for us to communicate a lot of different things. Um, very easily with limited information or limited repeated information.

And we've already done that with our Demo Graphic Legend. And so there's no reason to try and reinvent the entire wheel here. So what I'll do is I will right click duplicate view and duplicate with detailing, and that essentially gives me a copy of that.

And so I'll rename it and call it the Floor Plan Graphic Legend. And I'm just going to delete this part of the end where it says copy one. Okay.

And then we'll just start doing a couple of updates here. So instead of Demo Graphic Legend, it'll be Floor Plan and just expand that text box a bit. We're going to have two columns here.

We want to move that over. We've got our first one in place. And so I'm going to move these guys off to the side.

Because we're not going to use those. And what we're going to do is we're going to actually illustrate our different wall types here. And we're going to do that with our legend components.

If I go to my annotate tab legend, I can go to legend component here. And it's really cool. Because I can actually go in and I can pick a wall type.

And in this case, I'll pick one of the ones we're using here, which is the EIFS on metal stud. And it's set to section right now, but I can go to floor plan. And if I change my detail level after placing it, you can see that you can see, I can now look at all the different layers of it.

This length here is determined by this host length. If I make it say five feet, uh, it'll be pretty close to what I had already. And then I can go through and I can actually use material tags to label the entire thing.

If I go to material tag here, I can actually tag these elements and it lets me use those to label my different portions of the wall. And so I'll grab this one and that's my first, first piece here. And there's a couple of things that we can change.

First off, there's no leader on that. We definitely want to have a leader. So edit type, add the arrow head.

We'll go with the 15-degree filled, and then I could go through and I can tag the rest of it. So material tag again, and that's going to be the airspace. And then we've got our sheathing here, and they certainly don't make it easy for you to line this up because these are all center-justified tags and text, and it takes a little bit of finagling to get the arrow where you want it, but it's not too bad.

Okay. So material tag again, this'll be our light gauge metal framing. And then one more, we'll have our gypsum board layer here.

Now, as fun as that was, it was kind of a pain in the neck to have to try and adjust each one of those. We can always go in, we could edit the family on the tag. And you can see here, the tag is set to be center-justified text.

If I wanted to, I could actually change that to left-justified text. And if you look at the label, it's going to be the material description. If you had a description on the text that you had there, you could go in and you can actually adjust that to match more closely what you want it to say.

So I'm going to go ahead and load into project, and this is going to get all messed up here, but that's okay. We'll overwrite the existing version and you can see, like I said, it got kind of weird, but now we have the ability to make this look a little bit better. So I have to kind of fix these tags a bit, but it's not too bad because I can now Left Justify everything.

And I know some of you were really hoping that would happen. Because if you're anything like me, you would definitely not be able to live with not having these line up. So the other Elephant in the room here is the text we would use for something like this would almost most definitely be all caps.

And like I was mentioning a second ago with the parameter type, this would just be the material description. We can do this for all of our different wall types and create the rest of the legend.