How to Assign Departments to Spaces and Color Code Them in Your Office Layout

Now we're going to go ahead and assign our departments to these different spaces, and doing that is going to give us the ability to color them differently. So the first thing that I want to do to make this as easy as possible on me is I'll make a schedule. So I'll make a schedule that will represent the rooms that we have in here.

And so I'm going to find Rooms in the Schedule list here. And this is going to be our Tenant One. And so we're going to use this Tenant One phase because rooms are phase-specific, and so it will only show those rooms.

And so if I hit OK, then we can create our different categories. And so I'm going to go with Name, I'm going to go with Area, and then I'm going to go ahead and pick Department. And those are the three that we'll use for right now.

And I'm just going to go ahead and hit OK here. Because I want to see all of these rooms located within the schedule, I'm just going to expand this out so I can see everything. The Area definitely does not need to be that big.

But now we can go through and give the different types of spaces their departments. And so these are user-driven, so we can go ahead and give them their name. So our Lobby, we can call Circulation.

The Open Office is going to be called Open Office. Conference Rooms, I'm just going to call Conference. And then our offices will be defined as Private Office.

And so all of those are going to be defined as Private Office. So I can go through and just use the dropdown here to define each one of those spaces. And keep in mind, this is something that you could do in the plan view if you find it easier, but I find filling out the spreadsheet seems to be the easy way for us to get through this.

It also allows us to make sure we're not making any mistakes because we can see all of the different departments right in front of us here. The Server Room, I'm going to call Service. And then the Phone Rooms are going to be Conference as well.

And then Open Office. And you can see we've kind of gotten the ones that we've already created here. The Break Room, not yet.

---

And then the Conference Rooms, as expected, will be Conference space. Now that all departments have been established, we can pop back over to our TI Plan. And we can go ahead and set a Color Scheme.

And we can set it based on Rooms and then Department. And it's going to give us a color. And we can go ahead and use that and hit OK.

And now it's gone in and created colors. They've definitely changed their preference and scheme because this is pretty bad. So what we'll do now is go in and adjust those colors to something that's a little easier on the eyes.

And so again, we've talked about this many, many times, but this is very subjective. So you can pick the colors that you think work best for your use. But I typically try to pick more muted colors so that they don't take over the plan.

Because it can get a little intense real quick. So really, I'm just trying to stay within kind of the same value here, and then just adjusting it throughout.

Okay, and then our Service Room—those always get a gray color. And there we go. Our Office and different spaces have been assigned colors.

Again, probably not my favorite choice here, but you can definitely go through and make these changes. It's not a one-time pass at it to get it perfect.

It's something that, in our office, we've gone through and done and redone and done and redone over and over again to make sure that they are the colors that we want for our work. And then just the Private Office here. And then the Server—actually just going to have it be a gray color.

---

The last one I'll change here is the Lobby, which is our Circulation space. And then the Break Room—it's a little too muddy. And then the Conference Room—I think we'll adjust that one as well.

Okay, that is definitely much better. Now we've got it set up with the different colors, so we can easily see things. And this is where you kind of want to take a look to make sure everything is showing up correctly.

I can see there's one thing that's pretty odd here. And this happens sometimes when you get families from the internet—they don't behave properly. So you can see our booth seating is not showing up correctly.

I have a feeling it's because there are elements within this family that are just not visible in the plan view. And so if we go to Edit Family here, you can see that there are 3D elements that are represented. But if I were to select them and go to their visibility settings, I would bet that Plan and RCP is unchecked—like you see here.

If we just check that and hit OK, we can load it back into our project and overwrite the existing version. And you can see now it shows up the way we were expecting it to. Now that we've got this all set up, we can get this view ready to go onto a sheet, and then clean up some of our tags as needed—especially this one.

And then take a better look at the graphics and see, because I feel like the furniture might be a little strong in this view.