Draw better

Thoughts from Shelter team member Sam Lauer

For the past few years, I have been working on compiling Shelter’s graphic standards into a manual. The manual is already almost a hundred pages long, and it feels like I’ve only scratched the surface of how we as a firm try to put together our drawings. There’s still a lot of ground to cover.

But why should we care about architectural graphic standards at all? And what are they? Good questions! The quick answer: they make drawings easier to create and read, but let’s unpack that a little more.

The importance of a shared graphic language

Legibility is critical in our industry. As architects, we create a detailed instruction manual for the construction of a building. Any ambiguity in communication between designers and contractors can have financial, health, and safety ramifications. Standards around how we create these instruction manuals (drawing sets) have been developed to reduce this ambiguity, and in many cases, these standards are based on wider industry conventions. Drafting or BIM (Building Information Modeling) programs like Archicad, Revit, and AutoCAD help to further reinforce the typical symbols used in drawings. Across the board, drawing conventions and symbols like the section cut below are easily recognizable within the industry.

Communicating brand identity through graphics

On a company level, these symbols can be an opportunity for marketing. Many graphics can be modified to be firm-specific while still being recognizable. For example, if you’ve spent any time at all looking at our website or social media, you’ve probably seen a bunch of nifty little glyphs floating around (read more about the background on these in our Shelter symbols explained blog post).

We’ve incorporated these glyphs into some of our drawing annotations to act as a visual signature within our plans. For example, an industry-typical interior elevation tag looks like the symbol on the left (this is the default that is built into Revit, one of the BIM programs we use daily). We’ve taken the arc glyph in red below from our Shelter branding to create our own version of the tag on the right. This is still widely recognizable as an elevation tag, but is specific and unique to our drawings.

        

Graphic standards can be important for firm culture too. We take a studio approach to design at Shelter, with our process being a group effort rather than something that only one person can take credit for. Having a uniform, standardized way of putting together our drawings helps reinforce the collective nature of our work and makes us less concerned with personal authorship.

Finally, on a personal level, I enjoy having graphic standards as a designer because it makes my job easier! I’m more interested in designing spaces and figuring out how the structure and details will come together, whereas graphic design has never been my strong suit (though the exercise of compiling our standards has certainly made me more aware of things to consider in that regard). Having a list of easily understandable rules for how to put our drawings together means I don’t have to think too hard about it, and can instead focus on the elements of design that I enjoy.

A look behind the curtain

Creating a unified package of graphic standards for Shelter has not been a simple process, but it’s an important one. Many of us at Shelter have experience at different firms where we were trained to draw things a certain way, which influences what we think of as a “good” or “clear” drawing. As we adjust our way of drawing to the Shelter standard, we ask questions about why things are drawn the way they are. Sometimes this opens up a larger discussion around our current standards and leads us to re-examine why we do things a particular way. The overarching goal is to create a clear standard that works for our designers in as many circumstances as possible.

One example of a traditionally accepted architectural graphic standard is to capitalize all notes in a drawing. A quick Google search will tell you that this practice comes from a time when everything was hand-drawn and hand-lettered. Because everybody has a different handwriting style, writing in all caps allowed firms to ensure that notes would always be legible.

I’m trying to move our annotation standard away from all caps because I believe reading is generally easier with sentence case rather than all caps. Modern drafting software also ensures that illegible handwriting is a thing of the past. However, not everybody agrees with me, and our standard remains the industry norm to write annotations in all caps… for now.

Annotations are only one small part of a firm’s graphic standards, but they can offer a glimpse into some of the components we consider as we develop our standards.

Graphic standards visualized

Let’s look at another example of a graphic formatting decision. Details A and B in the image below show a few different options for formatting annotations. Technically speaking, there’s no one right answer, but we try to choose the most widely legible option. Here’s how we’d think through the following scenario:

1. Let’s start with how we align our text. Most print media aligns text to the left, like in Detail B – which creates a clean visual break between the text and drawn portions of the detail. The downside of this arrangement is that the overall detail has a ragged right edge. Aligning this text to the right instead – as seen in Detail A – cleans up the messy edge and creates a more unified-looking detail.

2. How about our text leaders? We could make all leaders break and then angle to point to something – as in Detail A – or lead horizontally from the text until they can turn 90 degrees – as in Detail B. Visually, the orthogonal leaders in Detail B start to look very similar to the vertical lines of the detail components, making the detail more difficult to read. Detail A breaks the leader lines halfway between the drawing and the text, and then angles them to where they are needed. Visually, the diagonal lines blend less with the detail components, and are easier to follow.

3. Finally, what happens if we change the leader’s arrowhead? Some sort of pointy arrowhead – as seen in Detail A – is pretty typical in many industry drawings. It allows you to be precise in indicating which part of the drawing the annotation applies to. A downside of line-based arrowheads can be that they start to blend in with the lines in the drawing – again making it more difficult to tell detail components apart from leader arrows. Some folks prefer a filled dot or a heavy end to their leaders instead – as seen in Detail B. This is less precise, but it is also less likely to blend in with the rest of the graphics.

So, what’s the best way to annotate a drawing? There are multiple options with their own strengths and weaknesses. In the end, we chose a mashup of the notes from Details A and B for our standard. As a firm, you have to decide what is important to you and what works well for your team. Sometimes graphical neatness is more important, and other times legibility takes priority.

Unifying design through graphics

Graphic standards play a crucial role in enhancing communication, ensuring clarity, and maintaining brand identity. They create a common language for project contributors including designers, contractors, and consultants to reduce ambiguity and potential miscommunications.

Graphic standards also help establish a firm’s visual signature and contribute to firm culture, and for our team, emphasize the collaborative nature of work. For designers, adhering to graphic standards simplifies our process, allowing us to focus on the creative aspects of our job. Developing unified graphic standards is a tedious but critical and rewarding process that will benefit both our team, our project collaborators, and our clients.