nora_park•19d agoProlific Poster

Noticed a weird shift in blueprints over the past few months

I've been seeing more and more architectural drawings that skip the old standard symbols for things like switches and outlets... they're using generic callouts instead. Is this a new thing or just the firms I'm working with in Portland?

3 comments

3 Comments

parker18319d ago

Same thing is happening on projects here in Seattle. A couple months ago one of my regular structural firms switched to all callouts instead of standard symbols and it threw me off for a few days. Seems like it might be a West Coast trend spreading through the offices.

tara_patel19d ago

Oh man absolutely! Same thing happened to me on a project out of Portland last month. The structural team swapped all their beam and column callouts for these tiny little text boxes with notes like "see detail A5.2" and I was flipping back and forth for half an hour trying to find the right sheet. It's like they're trying to make us work harder to read the drawings, you know? I get that symbols can be clunky but having to hunt down every single connection in a sea of callouts is just brutal. I really hope this doesn't catch on everywhere because my eyes are already tired enough from staring at blueprints all day.

ray_campbell4619d ago

I read a thing last week about offices on the West Coast doing this to save drafting time, but it just shifts the work to us in the field. Makes me wonder if they actually tried reading their own drawings before rolling it out. Seems like a shortcut that cuts the wrong way for the people who actually build stuff.