ABSTRACT
Before commencing any drawing, whether a design drawing for a client or a working drawing for a contractor, it is important to take time to consider how much additional text information is going to be located around the drawing; to determine at what scale the plan must be drawn to show clearly what is trying to be portrayed; and to consider how all the information will be arranged on the sheet. ere is nothing worse than spending hours preparing a drawing, only to nd that there is too much information to t on one sheet and that it must all be condensed to a point at which it becomes unreadable or hopelessly cluttered. It is always better to have too much space than too little. Excessive space can be made to look acceptable by carefully arranging the information on the sheet, but will look absurd if all the information is packed tightly into one corner, leaving large areas of the remaining sheet blank. Some thought must also be given to the sequence in which the information should be read. Clearly, somebody unfamiliar with the drawing will rst need to look at the title block to determine what the drawing is about, which site it belongs to and so on, even before the plan is unfolded. It is for this reason that there are explicit conventions for the placing of common elements to all drawings (such as the title block being placed in the bottom right-hand corner of the sheet).
