Create a graphic symbols legend is a crucial step in any project planning, assisting professionals to comprehend the title sheets or lead sheets in any drawing set more effectively. This guide provides a step-by-step process to create a legend, starting from setting the scale and giving it a title, to adding different symbols and descriptions.
Key Insights
- The creation of a graphic symbols legend begins with setting the scale, preferably to an eighth inch, and titling it. This is typically followed by drawing a detail line and adjusting its length and width as per the requirement.
- Adding text to the legend comes next, where the text size and type can be adjusted. This tutorial suggests using three sixteenths aerial as quarter inch may be too big.
- The graphic symbols legend can be populated with different symbols that are loaded into the project, each followed by an appropriate description. The symbols include a wall tag, keynote tag, grid bubble, room tag, north arrow, and revision tag, among others. The symbols and descriptions are organized into two rows for clarity and ease of understanding.
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Now we're going to go ahead and get into creating some of the legends that we're going to use for this project. And the first one we're going to do is create a graphic symbols legend. And this is just something that you'll typically see on title sheets or one of the lead sheets in any drawing set.
And it's similar to some of the stuff we've done before, but it's just a slightly different twist on that. We will go ahead and jump into legends from the View tab, pick legend. And then we'll set our scale and give it a title.
So I'm going to go ahead and set the scale to eighth inch. And then I'll give it a title. And I'm just going to call this graphic symbols.
And once you've got this all set, you just hit OK. And if you recall, the way this worked when we did it previously is we just end up with a big blank sheet. There's a little bit of guess and check here, but we can do our best and see if we can get this to work.
So I'm just going to draw a detail line. If I go to the Annotate tab and we can go to detail line. And I'll go ahead and draw the line here.
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And again, just a random length and width, and we're going to adjust it after we get some of the symbols in, because then we'll see how wide we actually want this to be. First thing I'm noticing, though, is mine was set to overhead lines. That's not what I want here.
I'm going to go ahead and use a thin line for this. And then we're going to go ahead and apply some text. And we'll just go to the Annotate tab and text here, and then we'll just pick the size that we want.
I'm going to go ahead and make a new one because I'd like to use three sixteenths aerial because quarter inch is going to be a little too big. So just do edit type, duplicate, and then we'll change this to three sixteenths. And of course, because I made it three sixteenths here, I should be making that adjustment here as well.
And so everything looks good here. And double checking, everything looks good. We'll hit OK.
And then I can just create a text box, and then I'll type in graphic symbol. And you can see that the first line that I created is freakishly small, and we kind of knew that, but we were just getting stuff started here. So I'll move this up to the left here, and then I'm going to drag this line across.
And we want to make it about 70-ish feet. You know, it's not an exact science here, but we are going to adjust it a little bit. So I'm just dragging it across here using the grip at the end and then hitting it to, you know, about where I want it to be.
That looks good there. And you can kind of see how we'll be able to create a couple rows of symbols and text to represent the different drawing symbols that we're going to use in this project. And now we're going to go ahead and add the symbols.
If I go to the annotate tab, which is where we were before, I'll go ahead and hit symbol. And then we have a bunch of different options in here for the symbols that are loaded into the project. So the first one I'm going to grab here is going to be the wall tag.
And we have two different options. We have half inch and quarter inch. I'm going to grab the half inch one.
And I'll just kind of place it, say, somewhere over here. And again, we'll put some text. And so we can use keyboard shortcuts for that.
I use TX for that keyboard shortcut to keep moving. And then I'll change my text to the 30 seconds aerial. And then I'll go ahead and put a description.
So this is a wall tag. So I'll say wall tag. And now we'll go ahead and repeat that process for a number of different ones.
And you can see here, I'm just going to try and line this up as best I can. I kind of want that grip to be right about there. And you can use your directional pad on your keyboard to fine tune it.
And then I'll just set it a decent distance apart. This is really subjective here. You can kind of have it closer or further away, whichever one you want.
But our goal here is going to be to create two different rows of symbols here. One here and then another one there. And we can go ahead and add another one.
What we'll do here is we'll go ahead and select both of these items here. Remember, using control to add to the selection. And then we can go ahead and hold down the control key.
And as we drag down, it'll make a copy. And what I can do is I'd like these to line up. And the symbols are going to be hard to get to line up.
But the text is easy because it'll recognize each other. If I just make the copy, you know, at a reasonable distance away from each other here, I can drag the text around a little bit. But the symbols are not going to recognize each other, which is OK, because this is going to be a different shape anyway.
So this next one that I'm going to put in here is going to be the door tag. And of course, I went from the one at the very end to the one at the very beginning just to make us do more scrolling than we need to. But it's no big deal.
And actually, you know, I want this one to be the keynote tag. So I'll go ahead and add another one. And one of the tricks that I like to use throughout is the create similar.
When you hit that CS or you right click and then you can do create similar, that allows you to add another one. And so this one will actually be the keynote tag. And there's a few different options for keynote tags.
So you can see this is one of them. And then we've got box large and box small. And we're going to go ahead and stick with the box small option here.
And what I like to do is because as you've noticed, they like I mentioned, they don't really recognize each other. So I'll just draw a line here that I can use as kind of my basis for keeping these things centered on each other. If you don't do this, you know, it'll be a little wonky.
It won't be too bad because it's fairly lined up already. But I can't control myself here and I have to make it as perfect as I can. So Revit doesn't allow these symbols to recognize each other, but they will do that when you're in the project.
So you don't have to worry about them aligning there. But in the legend, these these don't have any reference to each other. So I'll just go ahead and line that up as best I can.
If you really need to fine tune it, remember, you can zoom way in and you can kind of use your nudge to do smaller nudges, but that's really unnecessary. But if you really have to, like if you're like me and have to have it perfect, you can definitely do that. So I'm going to just rename this one to keynote tag, and then I'll just copy this down again.
And you can see it likes to be in alignment, which is nice. And then we'll do door tag. And then we'll kind of keep moving down the line.
We just use that create similar. And then we can change the type here, this is going to be a grid bubble. And instead of scrolling up and down like a maniac here, we can just type in grid, you see how it just finds what we're looking for.
We got grid head circle, which is what we want. And then I can place this one appropriately. And again, using that control trick, copy it down.
And we can call this one grid bubble. And we'll just keep moving, moving our way down here. And so the next one that we're going to do is going to be the room tag.
And so create another symbol. And again, I can just kind of start typing in here. And I can do room tag, I'm gonna do room tag with area because it's gonna have more stuff on here.
And then I'll place this one, you know, using that center line again, to get it as close as I can. And then just using that control trick to drag it down. And this one will be room tag, then we'll do a north arrow.
And you can see this one wants to be lined up. There we go. We got one out of five here, or six.
So I'll go ahead and make that copy, give it a name, you kind of see a pattern here. This is one of those things that, you know, you might use different symbols in your drawings, than what we're doing here. So it's like, if you had to recreate this for your project type, then you know, it can be pretty easy to do.
And you'd be able to go ahead and do the same thing. And so what I'll do is I'll just keep going until we get them all. So I'm gonna do one more, which is the revision tag on this side, and add the appropriate text.
And you'll notice the text editing tool doesn't allow you to clear like that. So you do have to hit backspace first to get it to clear the text. So you can type again, it's an odd quirk, but it's something we can easily work our way around.
And so what we'll do is we're going to go ahead and save here. And then we'll jump in in the next video and get the other side going.
