Design View: Your Sign IDs and Colours on the Plan

When we built maps in Signplanr, they had one customer: the installer. Drop a pin, number it, colour it by status, and the crew can find every sign and tell you when it's up. That still works exactly as it did.

But a second group kept showing up with the same map and a different need. Designers, signage consultants and sign companies wanted the plan as a design artefact: their own sign IDs on every pin, colours by sign family rather than by install status, and a drawing they could put in front of a client or drop into an install pack. Most of them were producing that plan in other software — a design tool, a marked-up PDF — and then re-entering the same signs into Signplanr to run the install.

Design view ends the double entry. Same map, two views.

Two views of one map

Every plotted map now has an Install | Design toggle in the toolbar.

Install view is unchanged. Pins show the sign number, colours show install status, and it is what your contractors see in the field app.

Design view changes three things. Each pin carries a label tag with the sign's ID, name or number. Pin colours come from the sign type instead of the status. And a legend in the corner lists the types on the map with a count for each. The legend collapses to a pill when you want the plan to yourself.

Your choice is remembered per map on your device, and each event can set a default view so a designer opens straight into Design.

Sign IDs, with instance numbering

The label on a design plan is rarely the number Signplanr assigns. It's the ID from the sign schedule: N21Aw-1, ID10w-7, whatever the naming convention on the project happens to be.

Every sign now has an optional Sign ID field for exactly that. Where several signs carry the same ID, Signplanr numbers each instance for you — N21Aw-1_1, N21Aw-1_2, N21Aw-1_3 — and the numbering never reuses an instance that's still live. The ID shows in the signs list, in search, on the sign page and in the map pin.

If your schedule lives in a spreadsheet, a Sign ID column round-trips through CSV import and export. Import a schedule and the IDs come in intact; export it and they go out the same way, instance numbers included.

Colours you choose

Sign-type colours are set once, in your sign type library, as a Design view pin colour. Wayfinding navy, identification orange, safety red — whatever your plans already use. Leave a type on automatic and Signplanr assigns a palette colour so the map is readable from day one.

When one event needs something different, override the colour on that event's Sign types page. The override applies to that event only, and Install view never uses these colours at all.

Labels that place themselves

A plan with fifty label tags on top of each other is not a plan. Design view lays tags out automatically: on the side the sign faces where it can, otherwise the nearest clear spot, always avoiding the other tags and pins. When you want a tag somewhere specific, drag it. The position is saved with the sign, and you can reset it from the pin menu.

The same layout code runs in the PDF, so what you tidied on screen is what prints.

Export the pack

Two exports come with Design view.

Export this map as PDF opens the export dialog already set to the view you're looking at. A Design export is a complete pack: a cover page, the plan with your labels and colours, a colour key, and a schedule sorted by Sign ID. Pin size matches the editor by default; switch to print-readable pins when the plan is very large and you want every label legible on paper.

Export current view as image saves a PNG of the current viewport. For the deck, the email, the chat message — the places a PDF doesn't fit.

And in the field

Installers can see the same IDs. A Field app label setting on the event shows contractors Sign IDs instead of sign numbers on pins and in their sign list, while their colours stay on install status.

Available now

Design view, Sign IDs and pin colours are on every Signplanr plan, including Free. The Design Map PDF pack uses PDF export, which starts on Starter.

Read the walkthrough in the Help Centre, or start free and switch a map to Design.