Another quote, from one of my favorite books, Stage Design, Howard Bay, Drama Book Specialists, 1974. Long out of print, but look for it used.
And then there's this: Virtual Magic Sheet.
Of course, Bay is talking about a six piano-board musical and not a 26 DMX universe show with 200 moving lights, but the concepts remain valid. The designer should distill the paperwork to the minimum necessary to get the job done. He probably doesn't care if the lamp in the Leko is an FEL or GLC, or what universe the VL3000Spot backlights are on.Lighting folk accumulate too many pieces of paper. Frustrated engineers unable to find an excuse for flashing a slide rule, they make up for it with complicated documents. This pseudo-organization leads to chaos at dress rehearsal time. With a full compliment of actors, singers, dancers, musicians and stagehands in suspended animation, the light designer amidst his squawk box, headphones, and little beaver assistants with containers of coffee, is scrambling between blueprints, board diagrams, focusing charts, clipboards and cue sheets struggling to find one light and match it up with the one switch that turns it on and off. This gory predicament can be avoided by lettering all the relevant material on one thing, namely the plot. After the show is focused even the unwieldly plot can be transposed to a simple code on a piece of cardboard that folds into the pocket (with cues listed on the reverse side). Extreme example: the original Man of La Mancha plot was confined to one 3 x 5 inch index card--one side of the card, of course. That is just a different fetish, isn't it?
And then there's this: Virtual Magic Sheet.