Monday, March 16, 2015

Case Study

Greetings to All.

I am trying to arrive at consensus with my colleagues regarding some aspects of our Standards and Procedures for Revit.

Many Revit users follow the practice of customizing content with a "company" acronym to signify that the content is vetted to conform to office standards. My personal preference is to precede each family type name with an acronym derived from the family category, and I have now expanded the list to include content in all disciplines. I maintain that the presence of the acronym provides ample significance.

However, in the Project Browser, I contended that OOTB naming of standard content was desirable. My view was countered with the argument that confusion may result if other parties with whom we might collaborate used modified content with OOTB naming.

One well-respected colleague has developed a naming strategy that includes the prefix ‘AN’ for most annotations. I’m inclined to concede, but I happen to disagree on the practice of ALL CAPS in the browser.

Again, most users follow the tradition of capitalization of sheet names, however I would even question that practice. I believe it is a remnant of old-fashioned CAD thinking, where the practice originated because of the extension from hand drafting. (I was there.) ALL CAPS is generally avoided in graphic design and web design because it is harder (slower) to comprehend. There is some fairly consistent information available to back this point of view.

I’d like to know what other Revit users have to say about these options:


3 comments:

  1. I completely agree on your view with regard to all caps! I HATE all caps (ironic emphasis intended).

    I agree, it is left over from hand drafting/CAD and in the computer age, it is like shouting. I always use/prefer mixed case.

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  2. Jay, I don't mind the type abbreviation at the start, but also prefer the full word descriptions on the left. I have always felt the cryptic abbreviated words as you show on the right is like learning another language, though visually you don't want them too long either. Just my opinion.

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  3. I gave up the all caps vs sentence case a long time ago... too many other things to argue about.

    I too use abbreviations as a prefix and organize from general to specific (all tags together, for example). For model families I also add a suffix indicating hosting characteristics (FH = Floor Hosted, FB = Face Based, UH = Un-Hosted, etc.).

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