Everything there is to know about drawing-centric collaboration workflows in Constructable

Constructable is for project teams who live in the plans, not in their inbox.

Why drawing‑centric collaboration matters

Most construction project conversations still happen outside the drawings: in email threads, screenshots pasted into chat, and scattered meeting notes. Even when you use a construction software platform, you often end up downloading a PDF, marking it up somewhere else, and then trying to describe “that area by Grid 3/E” to someone who isn’t looking at the same view.

That disconnect is expensive. It’s how mis‑coordination happens, how assumptions slip through, and how you end up walking a site wondering, “Didn’t we talk about moving this wall?”

Constructable is built around a different idea: the drawings themselves are the center of collaboration. Instead of sending the drawings out to where conversations happen, Constructable brings conversations directly onto the drawings—live, structured, searchable, and always up-to-date.

At the heart of this idea is a new tool we call Topics.

Topics: the new collaboration “layer” on top of your drawings

A Topic in Constructable is a dedicated layer of markups + media‑rich comments that sits directly on top of your drawings. You can think of each Topic as its own mini‑workspace:

Markups: clouds, highlights, takeoff measurements, symbols, and pins placed directly on the sheet.
Comments: rich‑text discussion threads with mentions, attachments, and even screen recordings, all anchored to specific markup shapes.
Context: every Topic knows which sheets and which locations it touches, so you can always jump straight back to where a conversation started.

Instead of one giant "markup" layer where everything piles on top of everything else, Topics let you break your work into focused layers—one per issue, idea, or coordination thread.

Some examples:

A “Structural review – Level 2” Topic that holds all markups and comments related to that review.
A “MEP coordination – East wing” Topic that spans multiple sheets and keeps its own conversation separate.
A private “My takeoff notes” Topic for a single estimator to work in without cluttering everyone else’s view.

Because Topics are first‑class entities (not just annotations on a PDF), Constructable can treat them like real project data: you can sort, filter, share, search, and archive them as your project evolves.

Flexible sharing: private notes, focused groups, or project‑wide reviews

One of the most powerful aspects of Topics is how flexible they are in terms of who can see what.

When you create or edit a Topic, you can choose:

Only me and specific people: Keep a Topic private to yourself and a handful of teammates. This is perfect for early thinking, internal reviews, or sensitive coordination you’re not ready to share broadly.
Anyone at my company: Make it visible across your organization but not to external companies on the project.
Publish to everyone on the project: Turn it into a truly shared Topic that any project member with access to the project can see.

On top of those broad levels, you can also share with specific users—for example, looping in just the superintendent and the project engineer on a “Site logistics – crane pad” Topic, without publishing it to every sub on the project.

Under the hood, Constructable’s Topic model tracks whether a Topic is:

Organization‑accessible (anyone in your company can see it).
Project‑accessible (anyone involved in the project, including external subs, can see it).
And which specific users have been explicitly added.

In practice, this means you can use Topics for everything from personal scratch space to full plan review sessions—without ever leaving the drawings.

Topics that span one sheet—or many

Real coordination issues don’t respect sheet boundaries. A single decision might touch:

A plan view on one sheet.
A reflected ceiling plan on another.
A detail or enlarged plan somewhere else entirely.

Constructable’s Topics are designed for this reality. A single Topic can span as many (or as few) sheets as you need. As you place markups on different sheets, they remain tied back to the same Topic.

That gives you a few important advantages:

One Topic, full story: All related markups and comments across sheets roll up into the same Topic, so you can see the entire conversation in one place.
Latest sheets, not stale PDFs: Topics track the actual drawing set pages they’re on, including revisions, so you’re always looking at the current context when you revisit an issue.
Cross‑sheet navigation: From a Topic, you can jump straight to the relevant sheet(s) and see exactly where the markup lives.

Instead of spinning up separate “issue threads” per sheet, you keep everything tied to the underlying coordination problem.

Show, hide, and archive Topics like layers

When you’re viewing drawings, you don’t always want to see every markup from every Topic at once. Constructable lets you treat entire Topics like toggleable layers:

Show/hide individual Topics: Turn a Topic’s markups on or off with a single click.
Hide all / show all: Quickly clear the view or bring all Topics back into view.
Filter by sheet: The Topics sidebar highlights Topics that are currently visible on the sheet you’re viewing, and separates them from Topics that live elsewhere.
Archive Topics: Once a Topic is resolved or no longer relevant, you can archive it. Archived Topics can still be accessed and unarchived later, but they're hidden by default to keep your live workspace clean.

Behind the scenes, Constructable maintains a Topics store per viewer window that tracks which Topics are visible, which are hidden, and which one (if any) is active. That’s what allows you to treat Topics as a living stack of layers you can toggle as you work.

“Summoning” teammates into the exact spot on the drawing

Sending a screenshot and a red arrow over email is better than nothing, but it breaks down quickly:

The drawing might get revised, and now your screenshot is out of date.
It’s hard to tell exactly where on the plans someone is talking about when you're only looking at one tiny snippet.
The conversation gets trapped in an inbox instead of the project record.

In Constructable, conversations happen directly on the drawings inside Topics, using comment threads anchored to markup shapes. When you @‑mention someone in a Topic’s comment:

They'll receive a notification tied to that comment thread.
Clicking it takes them directly into the drawing viewer, to the right project, right sheet, and right to the markup you added.
The viewer opens in the correct mode (Topic vs RFI, etc.) so they’re looking at the same context you were when you wrote the comment.

Under the hood, each comment thread knows its “sheet path”—the route back to the exact drawing, revision, and markup shape. So “Can you look at this?” always means the same thing to everyone.

The result is fewer ad‑hoc screenshots, fewer “what are you looking at?” calls, and more of your decision‑making captured in a structured, searchable way.

Real‑world ways customers are using Topics

Because Topics are so flexible, customers have started using them in creative ways that go well beyond basic “issue tracking”:

3‑week lookahead mapped onto the site plan: Superintendents create a Topic and use markups to visually map out upcoming work on the site plan—color‑coding areas of work, adding notes, and keeping the lookahead literally on the drawing.
Asynchronous plan review with architects: Instead of everyone joining a live screen share, teams create Topics for different review areas and let architects and consultants respond in their own time. Every question and answer stays tied to the exact location on the sheet.
Private “scratch pad” for quick measurements: Estimators create private Topics to drop measurement markups and notes while they’re figuring out quantities. When something is worth sharing, they either publish the Topic more broadly or merge it into an existing shared Topic.
Punch, RFIs, takeoffs, and more: Because Topics share infrastructure with RFIs, punch lists, and takeoff items, your drawing viewer becomes a single place to coordinate all kinds of project data—not a bunch of separate tools.

If you’ve ever wished your “issue log” and your markups were the same thing, Topics are essentially that wish, implemented.

Tagging conversations inside Topics

As projects grow, the number of Topics and comment threads can grow too. That’s why Constructable lets you tag comment threads inside Topics.

For example, you might tag different threads with labels like:

"structural review"
"plumbing rerouting"
"fire stopping"
"value engineering"
"owner decision"

Those tags can then be used to filter and find the exact threads you care about—whether you’re preparing for a coordination meeting, following up on a specific discipline, or trying to understand all conversations related to a certain design decision.

Because tags are attached to the underlying comment threads, not just the Topic title, you can maintain high‑level Topics (like “Level 3 corridor coordination”) while still locating specific sub‑conversations inside them.

Topics as part of your AI‑searchable project memory

One of the guiding principles at Constructable is that nothing important should be lost just because it was “only” in a comment or a markup.

Topics participate fully in Constructable AI’s indexing pipeline:

Each Topic carries semantic context: title, status, and its relationship to the project.
Markup shapes and their associated discussion threads are connected back to Topics and drawing sheets.
When you ask Constructable AI a question—“What did we decide about relocating the fire riser room?”—the system can surface relevant Topics and comment threads, even if the decision was never written into a formal RFI or change order.

That means your drawing‑centric collaboration doesn’t just make today’s coordination easier; it also builds a searchable memory of how and why decisions were made across the life of the project.

How this differs from traditional drawing markup workflows

Compared to the “download PDF, mark it up, send a screenshot” workflow (or even some legacy platform viewers), Constructable’s drawing‑centric collaboration stands out in a few key ways:

Structured Topics, not ad‑hoc markups: Markups and comments are grouped into Topics you can share, filter, archive, and search—not just random annotations floating on a sheet.
Flexible visibility controls: Use the same system for private notes, small‑group collaboration, and project‑wide communication without changing tools.
Multi‑sheet, multi‑revision aware: Topics follow the drawings as they evolve, and can span as many sheets as a coordination issue requires.
Layer‑style control: Show or hide Topics like layers to stay focused, instead of living with a permanently cluttered markup layer.
Deep linking into the viewer: Mentions and notifications bring teammates directly into the right view, on the right sheet, with the right markup selected.
AI‑ready by design: Because Topics are real project entities with semantic context, they’re first‑class citizens in Constructable AI, not an afterthought.

All of this is powered by the same offline‑first sync engine that backs the rest of Constructable, so it works just as well in the job trailer as it does in the office.

See drawing‑centric collaboration in Constructable

If your team is still juggling screenshots, email chains, and competing copies of the drawings just to stay on the same page, using Topics can help.

They give you:

A shared language for issues, ideas, and reviews.
A live, drawing‑centric record of how decisions were made.
A collaboration layer that your whole team (and your AI tools) can actually work with.

If you’d like to see how Topics and the drawing viewer work together on a real project, we’d love to show you. You can contact our sales team to request a demo, and we’ll walk through your current drawing workflows and how other teams are using drawing‑centric collaboration to reduce friction, catch issues earlier, and ultimately keep their costs down.