Contact Information

I truly dislike to do the same task twice if I can avoid it, which is a great mentality when you're setting up a template. Something that was bothering me was filling out the contact information for our consultants on the cover sheet for every new project. Initially, we used plain text in a legend, which works but it was tedious, and not my favorite way. I decided to go about this the BIM way.

I created a generic annotation family with several contact information parameters. The area on the right is for company logo's.

For each contact, a new type was created. Don't forget to add a type for your client/owner. To sort them, I prefixed the company name with their discipline:

To get the logo's to automatically switch, I created a separate generic annotation family for each logo and assigned a visibility parameter for each in the contact family. Within the contact family types, all it took was to check the matching visibility parameter.

I placed several instances on our cover sheet, and set up our most frequently used consultants as the default contacts. Using a different consultant is as simple as selecting a different family type.

If it wasn't for the logo's which have to be placed manually, this could all be set up using family type catalogs and a contact database. This would make the family smaller, but we like the logo's so for now we'll keep them.

This technique works especially well if you use the same consultants/client on a regular basis. We've been using this family for over a year now. No time is wasted & new contacts are added easily = better template.