Project Plans

Adobe InDesign is not an ideal tool for creating complex, threaded gantt charts with all sorts of dependencies, relationships, and analytics. However, as designers, we often find ourselves needing to communicate basic project plans to our stakeholders, and EightShapes Unify includes all the project planning symbols you need to create an effective plan visualization.

Creating a Project Plan

The process for creating a project plan like the one above isn’t particularly complicated and can be finished in around 10 or 15 minutes once you’ve got a handle on the available symbols and a little InDesign mojo.

The steps to follow:

1. New, Blank Page
   Create a new deliverable page, in a format like letter landscape or tabloid landscape.
2. Project Plan Library
   Open the project plan library at /deliverables/_elements/projectplan.indl.
   
3. Vertical Lines
   Drag a backdrop of vertical lines (corresponding to your choice of 6 weeks, 2 months, 13 weeks, or 26 weeks) and place it onto a unique layer that you can eventually lock behind the remaining plan symbols. Use the Direct Selection tool to grab the top or bottom anchor points to resize the lines vertically to fit the space desired.
4. Activities
   Drag activity bars of one or more colors, label each one, and position them appropriately.
5. Events
   Add more and more events to activities, like inputs, deliverables, meetings, and sign offs.
6. Highlights & Groups
   Embellish the visualization with highlights (for Today, especially), vacations, holidays, and groups of activities.

Acknowledgements

This library wouldn’t exist without Livia Labate’s inspiration of “Hrm, it’d be really nice to have a collection of project plan symbols.” With that nudge and honestly not too much preparation work beyond that, we’ve had collection of symbols that have proved invaluable as we’ve used them time and time again since. Thanks Livia!