What are your CAD standards?

When I created CAD standards for our surveying department for my employer in Tucson, I used the national CAD standards as a general guide. I tried to adhere to it as much as possible, but only if it made sense for our needs. But it was nice that we were relatively close and consistent with them.

We do the same as @wendell and used them as the basis and general format for our standards.  Our survey products are always used internally (and sometimes externally) for engineering design.   All our linework is completed in 3D and is accompanied by a civil3d surface.  Civil3d 2018 through 2027 are still based on the 2018 core, so they all backwards compatible. 

@wa-id-surveyor great I actually didn't realize that 2018 was the core for the next series of Civil3D.

How closely to people adhere to the standards? I've seen some checklists or layer tables as reference, but seems like most common is new people get trained through lots of review back and forth until their output roughly matches the output their PM or head surveyor wants.

You have to think of the other end users of your product. Agencies? Other Professionals?

Use Wendell's sage advice!

Posted by: @vance-grissom

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@wa-id-surveyor great I actually didn't realize that 2018 was the core for the next series of Civil3D.

How closely to people adhere to the standards? I've seen some checklists or layer tables as reference, but seems like most common is new people get trained through lots of review back and forth until their output roughly matches the output their PM or head surveyor wants.

Without adherence to the standards you have no standards.  No one is allowed to create new layers, we have standards setup to cover all bases.  Certainly during the 'learning phase' you must establish new conforming layers and standards but once they are set, they are set.

As we used to say in the CAV, “We’ve upped our standards, so up yours.”

For CAD standards to work it has to be easier to use them than to not. For survey drafting this means templates, standard sheets, block libraries,  and field to finish. 

National CAD standards are set up for the military to build bases and things like that. Not real well suited to the kind of work most of us do. Still, a good framework to build on.

Ok thanks for replies here. Went down a rabbit hole last 2 weeks for some surveyors to (kindly) show me their layer schemas and why they chose certain format choices vs others. Lots of ways to skin the cat, even/esp in early phases of a project, examples like having each book and page be its own layer vs. by year, by type (parcels vs easements etc.). Cool to see how everyone has figured out some workflow that works for them. We were building custom .dxf export settings in our platform so concluded that we should keep it as flexible as possible so that everyone can just build their own. As long as we have org-wide templates, which help with the standardization problem.