What is HighDesign?

HighDesign is a computer-aided design (CAD) solution for Mac OS X with a modern, intuitive interface to help you transform your visions into detailed projects. Used in architecture, engineering, interior design, landscaping, mechanical drafting, and construction, HighDesign provides sophisticated tools for general 2D drafting, architectural design, illustration, and project organization.

HighDesign is available in three editions, LT, Standard and Professional, to best suit the needs of persons and firms in different disciplinary fields. Learn more...

Powerful CAD Tools

"If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first four sharpening the axe" -Abraham Lincoln.

With its wide range of drawing and editing tools, HighDesign provides you a solution to achieve your goals as a designer, in architecture, engineering, interior design, mechanical drafting, landscaping, and more!

The toolbars provide all the familiar drawing methods and objects you expect in a CAD software, from lines, arcs, and polylines to vector hatches and patterns; dimensions, styled texts and annotations; reusable symbols, parametric walls, columns, windows, and more.

The Freedom of Drawing

When you begin a drawing in HighDesign, all the important functions are at your fingertips: coordinates, length and angle constraints can be set with a click or key shortcut; lengths can be entered directly; midpoint, endpoints, objects, intersections and right angles are recognized by the snap function; automatic vertical, horizontal, parallel and perpendicular alignments dramatically cut the time required to complex geometries.

You decide the scale of the drawing and the level of detail of the drawing. Units include metric, imperial, and pixels/points.

Efficient Workflow

HighDesign offers advanced tools to keep your project well organized. Groups, Layers, Sheets, various selection methods and the Find tool help you keep everything in its place, easy to find and easy to modify. Automatically link drawing tools to specific layers to keep everything organized with no effort. No matter the size of your project, a good organization will improve your productivity and cut the project time dramatically.

Sheets (Standard and Pro)

Any project, be it of architecture, engineering, or design, usually includes several drawings ranging for example from site layout to sections and structural details. In the same way, in addition to layers a HighDesign Professional project uses sheets, each with its own page size, drawing scale and units, so you can have an entire project contained in one document where the drawings are always immediately available and under control.

A sheet in HighDesign has special attributes such as visibility, protection, etc., that make it a very convenient way of organizing a project: you can, for instance, place a different drawing on each sheet or use a sheet for the main drawing and draw details on additional sheets.

The ability to reorder, show or hide sheets, set transparency and protection, allows you to compose a complex project in a single layout.