Discover how to create a graphic legend in an architectural project, ensuring the graphics are consistent across the plan. Learn to add different elements, create a solid color field region, incorporate existing walls and doors, and save your work for future use.
Key Insights
- The graphic legend should carry the same scale as the view being used. This ensures a uniform look between the legend and the plan.
- Adding different elements to your graphic legend involves creating field regions, then adding items such as existing walls and doors. You can customize these elements to represent specifics like demolished structures.
- Once the graphic legend is created, it can be saved and copied to other views, ensuring consistency across different levels or sections of the architectural project.
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To create a graphic legend, we're going to go to our View tab, Legends, and we'll pick a legend here. We always want to give it a good name, right, so we know what it is. We'll call it Demo Graphic Legend.
And the scale should be the same as the view we're using, so a quarter inch. And the reason I say that is because that way we can make sure the graphics look the same between our legend and our plan, so that there's no inconsistency between what we're saying, like especially this hatch right here, is representing in the plan. So I'll hit OK.
And we just get a blank space here, and that's not a big deal, because we're going to add some stuff. So the first thing I'll do, I'm going to go to my Annotate tab, and I'll add title text here. So it says quarter inch aerial, and we'll start with that, and we'll say just the title.
- And then I'll draw a line, so I just use detail line, I use keyboard shortcut DL for that, and just kind of eyeballing it here, but something along these lines here looks good. So I just put a line under there.
I'll make it a little heavier. I'll go to wide lines so that it's a good delineator there. And then what we can do is we can add our different elements in here.
We've got our quarter inch title text here, and then what I could do is I could create a field region that's going to have the same color. So I'll go to Annotate, Field Region, and I'll just draw a field region somewhere over here. And this is going to be a solid gray field region, so you can see we have solid black, but we don't have solid gray.
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So I'll select solid black, because that'll be a good template to start with, and then I'll say Edit Type, Duplicate, and instead of solid black, we'll call it solid gray. And the color, I think you've guessed it already, 127, all the way across the board for RGB. And now we have a region that would represent our existing wall to remain, so we can use text again, and we're going to use 332nd aerial this time, and this will be existing wall to remain.
And I just go in and I kind of line these up a little better, so you can see it's about in the center of that. And then we do the same thing, and so I'll just take this one and actually just copy it down. If you select an item like I have done here, if you hover over it to the point where it shows that move symbol, and you hold down your control key and drag, it will actually make a copy, which is a pretty cool trick.
And so I can go in here and I can change this one. Instead of solid gray, I could just draw a rectangle around it, because I just want it to be a dashed line here, because it's going to be my walls to be demolished. You can see I've got a demolished line type, and I'm literally just going to draw a rectangle to trace around it.
And then I'll use my tab key to select the filled region and hit delete. Now I've got existing wall to remain. I'll rename this one existing wall to be demolished, and then we can add another one.
This is just going to be a drawing exercise here, but we'll just copy this down again. And what I'll do for this is I'll just draw a door. So I'll do like a two inch frame, and then we'll make this three feet.
And so that's the door frame itself. And then we can draw an arc to represent the circle. So it's another detail line using that demolished type, but we can use this center end arc, which will allow me to pick the center of it.
And then I can pick how the radius I want it to be, and then just the end. And it's pretty simple, quick way to draw a door. We'll just change this from existing wall to existing door.
And you can take this as far as you'd like, you know, existing window, you know, whatever else is being demolished on the plan. But that'll do it for us on this one. And so I'll take again, our template here, I'm going to copy it down.
And the only one we need here is for our roof and our floors. And I want to make it a little bit larger. So you can see more of the pattern.
But I will also edit the boundary again, and change this to have the demolished dash lines around it, which you can see here. And then we'll change it to diagonal crosshatch, because that's the pattern that we're using to represent it. And then we just have to change the name.
So instead of existing wall to remain, this is actually going to be existing floor, or roof to be demolished. And that's it, our simple, quick and easy demo graphic legend. Now that I have it all created here, what I could do is I can go into my project browser for legends, grab that legend, and put it on my sheet, I like to put it somewhere nice here, kind of like that.
And then I can take this right now it has the viewport title, which we don't need because we're already saying demo graphic legend there. And I can change it to have no title. And so we only have this type right now.
So I can say edit type, duplicate, and I'll say viewport no title. And you can see we've got some options here. And it's pretty simple.
They say show title says yes, and I can say no, and it goes away. And so we'll hit OK, title goes away. And this is one of my favorite new features of I'd say probably 2018 or so but still my favorite because I can take legends now and I can copy them.
And then I can paste them to other views. And we weren't able to do that in the past. So I can say, paste the line to current view for level one, paste the line to current view for level two.
So I'm going to go ahead and save because I've got my three sheets pretty well set up with how I want them to look for this. And then we'll take a look at some finishing touches and get ready to print for our midterm.
