Artifact Formatting

There are different levels of formality in artifacts, from rough sketches to final documents and drawings. As you prepare for documentation reviews the content of an artifact is obviously critical, but well-formatted, clear artifacts reflect your level of professionalism and care for your work. Hence, we provide some guidelines to help you.

Your artifacts must reflect careful and professional work and presentation.

For your convenience, artifact templates in both Microsoft Word and LaTeX formats are available on your Box drive in the Class Documents/Templates folder. You do not need to use these templates. It is preferable to format your artifacts on either letter-sized portrait pages or ledger-size landscape pages. This makes them easiest to print if needed on US printers.

When you want to combine multiple artifacts (like for a design review submission), do not create PDF copies of your drawings and other artifacts and then just paste them into Word - this makes the artifacts very difficult to read! Instead, combine the original PDF versions of your drawings and other artifacts into one of the following documents:

A PDF portfolio (using Acrobat) containing all the elements of your approval package, each of which must be a PDF file. Do not include other types of files in the portfolio, even if they are allowed by Acrobat!
A single PDF file of your stage approval package using the Capstone-provided LaTeX template, Acrobat Professional, or some other PDF editor.

The submitted file should have bookmarks that allow easy location of the individual artifacts included. Both the LaTeX template and PDF portfolios provide these bookmarks automatically. It is not necessary to add hyperlinks to the individual files. We want your time to be focused on making design decisions and creating artifacts that define your design.

Note: All engineering drawings should be completed on B-size drawing formats. Do not use A-size formats! Complete drawing standards are found in Engineering Drawing Standards.