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I must have been and interior designer in my past life.
Maybe I painted the walls inside pyramids, or maybe I decided which velvet cloth best accented the castle walls.
I don't know if that's the case, but I do know that I get an itch every once in a while to redesign a room. In fact, I spent all last weekend doing just that, from painting to changing the floor plan.
Luckily, I had a way to draw everything out first, or moving all that furniture several times would have really taken its toll. It was tough enough doing it once.
Figuring out floor plans is an easy task with SmartDraw Floor Plan Edition. The software offers a comprehensive way to draw up all kinds of floor plans, seating arrangements, landscaping and other designs.
SmartDraw has an excellent layout designed for easy use. The drawing tools are across the top. The object categories are on the left, with the object browser palettes below them. All this leaves a lot of room for the actual drawing.
The first thing that surprised me about SmartDraw was the range of project templates. Naturally, there's the templates for the home, such as those for kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms and the entire house. But there are also templates for apartments, landscaping, offices, classrooms, shopping centers, grocery stores, gymnasiums, assisted living facilities, restaurants, emergency exits and plans and modern building. Then there was the one that surprised me most of all—crime and accident scene reconstruction.
Yes, you can use SmartDraw to reconstruct car accidents for your insurance company or even a court case. Police can use the program to reconstruct crime scenes, first by drawing the layout of the scene, then by adding information such as where weapons, or even victims, were found.
That brought me to the next surprising thing about SmartDraw—the objects library. It's huge. There are dozens of templates and dozens of objects for each template. Gymnasium floor plans have weight equipment. Assisted living facilities have special beds and medical equipment. Restaurants have objects for professional kitchens, like extra-large ovens, as well as tables, chairs and other restaurant decor.
The beauty of all this is, these objects aren't confined to these templates. You can drag and drop objects from any category onto any template.
The object browser also is impressive. The object categories are in a tree list on the left of the screen, meaning you click on the arrow next to each category to drop a list within that category. Double clicking on the categories opens a palette underneath the object browser that provides dragable thumbnails of the objects.
The cool part is that you don't have to open categories to see the objects. As the mouse rolls over each category, a little window pops up with miniature thumbnails of the objects in that category. It makes it much easier to find the object you need, without having to open and close object palettes over and over.
If you still can't find exactly what you're looking for, either in templates or objects, then you can simply draw it. SmartDraw comes with a bevy of tools that allow you to draw shapes, rooms and even free-form objects or designs.
There are tools to color in background, rooms or objects. There are text tools to label objects or rooms.
The only thing SmartDraw doesn't have compared with other such products is a threedimensional walkthrough. I did miss seeing what it would be like to walk around the room I designed.
But such walk-throughs are usually found on more consumer-oriented programs, and this one is more professional than that. So while I miss the feature, I can understand why it's not there.
What is there is still very impressive. SmartDraw is by far one of the easiest design programs I've ever used. It has so much to offer, but the layout is designed not to overwhelm the user. Its ease of use may fool you into thinking it's on an amateur level, but it's tailor-made for professional use. It's great for use in all kinds of professions, from hoteliers and restaurateurs to investigators to medical personnel.
It's also ideal for home designers—from a past life or the present one.
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