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Shoutout to the guy who showed me his layer organization system
I watched a senior drafter pull up a 10-year-old set of plans the other day and find a buried detail in under 30 seconds. His trick was grouping everything by sheet sequence first, then by xref type within each sheet. Has anyone else found a naming convention that actually sticks?
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mia7001mo ago
Why do people always act like layer organization is some life changing epiphany? It's just colors and names on a screen. I've seen guys spend hours arguing about whether "A-ANNO-TEXT" is better than "A-TEXT-ANNO" and then still can't find anything because they got 500 layers no one touches.
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the_lee1mo ago
Wait... TWO DIFFERENT NAMING SYSTEMS from two different decades? That's insane. Who just keeps dumping new layers on top of old ones without matching the system? That coworker is a menace. I'd lose my mind if I saw "COLU-FRAM-STR" next to "STR-FRAM-COLU" and nobody bothered to fix it.
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knight.felix1mo ago
Funny enough, I once spent two hours helping a coworker untangle a layer mess that turned out to be two different naming systems from two different decades. The guy who set up the original files used "STR-FRAM-COLU" and the newer guy used "COLU-FRAM-STR" and they just kept piling on top of each other. We finally just started a fresh template from scratch and put the old stuff in a single "MISC" layer nobody ever opens.
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the_anthony1mo ago
Honestly, I used to be in the "just name it whatever and move on" camp. But then I had to dig through a 200-layer mess for a revision and wasted half a day. Now I’m a convert. The sheet sequence first, then xref type thing sounds solid, I’ve been doing "SHEETNUMBER_LAYERTYPE" and it’s cut my search time way down. Ngl, having a system that actually scales with old files is a game changer.
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