I was contacted by Sharon Harlon who writes articles for Interior Design Degree, a website dedicated to providing students with the information and tools needed in order to purse their interior design degree. She mentioned that she had just written the following piece and would I like to feature it on my blog. I thought the article was great, with lots of useful tips on software and websites for anyone that is looking to start a career in Interior Design. I hope you find it useful and thank you Sharon!
Interior designers today have a wide choice of design tools available right through their keyboards. You can find design software that is free to use and provides the ability to share your 3D designs with peers and clients. Paint and flooring companies, among many other interior design businesses, offer swatches and the ability to test colors against other design elements. Web sites also offer workshops, inspiration and access to materials that you may have never heard about before. All these online tools are provided in this list of the 25 most popular interior design Web tools available today.
Image: The California Shutter Company, styled by Pippa Jameson
Design Software
- 3Dream: Quickly and easily design and re-design your space in 2D and 3D then take snapshots to print, email or share with others. 3Dream has over 7500 models, textures and materials in our product library for you to design with.
- Arrange-a-Room: Ladies’ Home Journal provides this new interacvtive tool, courtesy of Better Homes and Gardens. Use this Shockwave plug-in tool to rearrange or design any room in a house.
- Autodesk Homestyler: Use this design tool for its drag-and-drop ease in layout and decorate with thousands of items and real products. Visualize in 3D and share your designs with others. They also support viewing shared designs on mobile devices.
- Design A Room: Armstrong products provides tools that allow users to design rooms from the floor up. Designs are categorized by design styles, and the emphasis is on flooring. Share your designs with peers.
- Design Your Dorm: DYD is a Web-based 3-D interior design tool that allows college students to customize their dorm room interiors and purchase their favorite room selections online. But, interior designers can use this tool as well for one-room designs. This tool allows collaboration.
- Floor Planner: This may be the easiest and best looking way to create and share interactive floor plans online. With simple drag and drop tools you can make accurate plans within minutes all on scale. Floorplanner BASIC is free for personal use. The PLUS account offers more space if you need it.
- Google SketchUp: Designers are using this innovative tool to create anything from coffee pots to skyscrapers. Re-imagine your living space and create model buildings for Google Earth. The free version is easy to use, but does not let users exchange files with other software, create documents or generate reports.
- MyDeco: Plan a home in realistic 3D for free with this Web site’s tool. The software includes a large range of real furniture, and you can get feedback and help from the online community. You also can enter your designs into competitions.
- Plan3D: This planning and design tool is built into a Web page. From basement to roof or just one room at a time, you can create or remodel a home. Plan3D uses dimensions in blueprint-like mode or in realistic 3D. Plan3D comes with over six gigabytes of 3D furniture and 3D cabinets, landscape items and textures for surfaces.
- PlanningWiz: PlanningWiz is an award winning design tool providing online simplified floor planning that supports consumer decisions in retail and real estate. Prospective buyers launch PlanningWiz from your website to quickly furnish and visualize themselves the space in real-time.
- See My Design: The goal here is to help you explore design and decorating ideas online through interactive tools that are supported by information about design styles, principles and elements, painting and color theory, room elements and design examples.
Websites
- American Society of Interior Designers: This site contains members-only tools and open source materials for anyone interested in interior design. Great source to learn about sustainable design, accessibility and design standards.
- Apartment Therapy: This site intends to save the world, “one room at a time.” Great inspiration for apartments, condos, homes and offices — anywhere that requires design ideas for small spaces.
- Architonic: This is an independent resource for architecture and design, providing ideas and inspiration for everything from homes to offices and from bathrooms to back yards. Be sure to browse through their carefully considered showcase of over 93.000 premium design products and materials.
- HGTV: Home and Garden television provides a site that any interior decorator cannot live without. Design rooms, refresh your color palettes, stay on top of design trends and learn landscaping through the advice provided by professionals.
- IKEA Hackers: Designers hack, personalize and re-purpose IKEA products into new items, providing inspiration along the way. This site has been running strong since 2006.
- Interior Design: Each month, the magazine and its Web site feature a variety of outstanding projects, the latest new products across all disciplines, industry news and more. With a print circulation of more than 76,000 (paid), and over 170,000 monthly unique visitors online, Interior Design offers an unparalleled level of design-hungry readership.
- Inventables: Inventables is the innovator’s hardware store, selling all kinds of materials in small quantities for purchase with a credit card. Product developers, researchers, artists, and inventors purchase products from the store every day to build prototypes and test concepts.
- Low Impact Living: You may want to decrease your impact, or you may run across a client who is obsessed with low impact living. If so, this site serves perfectly as a primer on low-impact living and a resource for tools, furniture and design elements that can help reduce that impact dramatically.
- U.S. Green Building Council: Learn how green buildings are certified, sign up for courses, workshops and newsletters, and explore green building research through this non-profit site. Their Green Home Guide is a great resource, and also a place to list your business if you focus on green design.
Other Tools
- Behr Paint Workbook: Register to use the workbook, where you can find colors, gain inspiration and start projects based upon Behr paint colors.
- Colors Pallete Generator: Upload an image to generate a color palette based on the image’s primary colors. Useful for quickly grabbing a particular color within an image for inspiration.
- DreamDraper: Create window treatments and caculate yardage as well as create new space plans with this tool. DreamDraper has hundreds of furniture and accessory templates for every room, including appliances, fixtures, rugs, windows, doors, fireplaces, plants and staircases. All of these items can easily be re-sized and re-positioned to represent exactly the perimeter of a room and the furniture in it.
- PANTONE Paints + Interiors: “The System” consists of over 1,900 colors in cotton, paper and digital formats. Drawing insight and direction from the fashion, beauty and industrial design markets, the PANTONE View Color Planner forecasting tool rounds out the System.
- Stainmaster Carpet Design Tools: Use the “vision board,” or choose a room and style it up to see the results. Learn about various carpet types and styles as well as pattern designs and current trends.
- 3Dream: Quickly and easily design and re-design your space in 2D and 3D then take snapshots to print, email or share with others. 3Dream has over 7500 models, textures and materials in our product library for you to design with.
- Arrange-a-Room: Ladies’ Home Journal provides this new interacvtive tool, courtesy of Better Homes and Gardens. Use this Shockwave plug-in tool to rearrange or design any room in a house.
- Autodesk Homestyler: Use this design tool for its drag-and-drop ease in layout and decorate with thousands of items and real products. Visualize in 3D and share your designs with others. They also support viewing shared designs on mobile devices.
- Design A Room: Armstrong products provides tools that allow users to design rooms from the floor up. Designs are categorized by design styles, and the emphasis is on flooring. Share your designs with peers.
- Design Your Dorm: DYD is a Web-based 3-D interior design tool that allows college students to customize their dorm room interiors and purchase their favorite room selections online. But, interior designers can use this tool as well for one-room designs. This tool allows collaboration.
- Floor Planner: This may be the easiest and best looking way to create and share interactive floor plans online. With simple drag and drop tools you can make accurate plans within minutes all on scale. Floorplanner BASIC is free for personal use. The PLUS account offers more space if you need it.
- Google SketchUp: Designers are using this innovative tool to create anything from coffee pots to skyscrapers. Re-imagine your living space and create model buildings for Google Earth. The free version is easy to use, but does not let users exchange files with other software, create documents or generate reports.
- MyDeco: Plan a home in realistic 3D for free with this Web site’s tool. The software includes a large range of real furniture, and you can get feedback and help from the online community. You also can enter your designs into competitions.
- Plan3D: This planning and design tool is built into a Web page. From basement to roof or just one room at a time, you can create or remodel a home. Plan3D uses dimensions in blueprint-like mode or in realistic 3D. Plan3D comes with over six gigabytes of 3D furniture and 3D cabinets, landscape items and textures for surfaces.
- PlanningWiz: PlanningWiz is an award winning design tool providing online simplified floor planning that supports consumer decisions in retail and real estate. Prospective buyers launch PlanningWiz from your website to quickly furnish and visualize themselves the space in real-time.
- See My Design: The goal here is to help you explore design and decorating ideas online through interactive tools that are supported by information about design styles, principles and elements, painting and color theory, room elements and design examples.
