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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 a well-formatted, clear artifact 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. See Formatting Printed Reports for more information on oversize (too big to fit on letter-sized paper) artifacts.

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.

If your sponsor has asked Capstone to provide a bound, printed copy of your final report, you must format your artifacts as described in Formatting Printed Reports.

Your External Relations Manager (either Lisa or Allyson) will work with your sponsor during September to determine whether or not your sponsor expects a bound, printed copy of the final report. Once this determination is made, please follow the recommended formatting decisions as you work on your project, rather than having to change everything at the end. In all cases, you should keep the source files for all of your artifacts in your Box folder so that you can change their formatting if your sponsor changes their mind about receiving a hard copy of the report.