What you need to know

- Before we get started, if you want some additional instruction on basic blueprint reading, make sure to check out my course called, Construction Management: Reading Drawings and Specifications, here on LinkedIn Learning. Now, I also want to acknowledge the fact that construction drawings or construction blueprints, as many of us still call them, come in all shapes and sizes and I mean this both in the literal sense, as in, some projects print on smaller paper, some print on large format sheets and others might supply them in a digital format, and I'm talking about the figurative sense, in that the look and feel of the drawings can vary widely from one designer to next. Some sets of construction drawings will be very complete with all the information you need, organized and easy to find. Other times, you'll have to hunt for information, jump between sheets or you might have to reference another set of drawings all together or find some standard details to locate what you need. Some drawings are cluttered and show all kinds of information in a single view and others might contain a minimal amount of detail. There are recommended standards that exist in the industry that tell designers how to organize and present information, what line styles and weights they should use and what information should be included on the different sheets. However, in my experience, these standards are just not closely followed. Now, that just means that reading construction drawings is really a skill that you'll develop over time. As you learn to jump from one set of drawings to the next. Eventually, you'll learn to recognize the style of different designers and you'll grow accustom to how to find the information you need. Throughout this course, I'll show you several different examples of civil construction drawings to illustrate the different styles and get you used to seeing the different ways that you might see information presented. In the exercise file tab, I've provided one sample set of civil construction drawings in a PDF format that you can download and open to explore and find information. Not all the examples I will show you here in this course are included as exercise files because I'll show you what I'm discussing right on the screen as I'm talking. But, if you want to explore a good set of civil blueprints for a basic construction project, download the sample set from the exercise file tab. In this course, I'll specifically cover how to find the information contained on different types of civil construction drawings and I'll define what I mean when I say civil construction drawings next.