Valhalla Island

The problem with trying to create your own, accurate floor plan is that it requires tools beyond the most basic while the more advanced is massive overkill. You want it to look clear enough for what’s in your head to be accurately presented but you don’t want to spend hours learning how to use something as complex as AutoCAD. In between tools exist but in their quest to make it easy they apply so many constraints it’s a frustrating battle to create what you really want.

After poking around OmniGraffle in the past I knew it had a set of stencils for space planning. On the outside OmniGraffle looks like it’s made for floor plan drawing — it’s got more power than something like a piece of paper or Scribbles while it’s no where near as intimidating as an architectural drawing application. On the inside I had trouble doing things as simple as aligning lines on top of each other. The library of stencils for making floor plans is not only extremely limited but also very basic in detail. The furniture stencil offers 4 beds, 5 couches and a grand piano only.

Searching revealed another graphing application that also does floor plans. ConceptDraw is the kind of software company that make the same software for Windows and Mac, charge a fortune, promote their products as “business applications”, require the filing of a large questionnaire to download the trial and follow up with constant emails asking if everything’s OK. I was initially very sceptical of ConceptDraw Pro 7.

Unlike OmniGraffle, ConceptDraw’s building plan library is bountiful. There’s huge arrays of all types of structures, furniture and appliances that look fantastic. Unfortunately it suffers the same flexibility problem as OmniGraffle. Just trying to break free of the grid for the ability to position elements on top of each other was frustratingly difficult.

I finally turned to Illustrator, not known for it’s architectural drawing abilities, it made more sense for floor plan drawing the longer I used it. It’s easy to connect and align elements, it’s easy to cut away segments of line and combine or layer simple shapes to create something more complex. I didn’t want to draw furniture from scratch, both OmniGraffle and ConceptDraw export their vectors in the highly interoperable SVG format. I exported doors, toilets, stoves, couches, beds, sinks and showers from both. Illustrator imported them flawlessly.

The trick is to use different stroke weights. Heavy for the outside wall, half that for inside walls, thick for doors but thin for their swing paths. The scissors, white arrow and align tools are your best friends here. Filling everything that’s not floor and ordering them correctly looks great too. I should have filled the kitchen and bathroom benches in mine.

The biggest problem with using Illustrator is that without getting tedious it’s impossible to ensure proper proportion. I simply guessed. These plans aren’t for building from, they’re to share your ideas, if you can’t tell it’s not in proportion then it doesn’t matter.

You can download my SVG file to open in Illustrator yourself and reuse some things not taken from the graphing apps like my walls, windows and blueprint background.