Every Button in the Kitchen Designer

From an empty room to a PDF, in eleven steps and sixteen short videos

If you would rather watch than read, start here. Each step below has a video of a minute or two — the real screen, narrated — that opens in the Learn player, where you can slow it down or jump between its steps. Watch one, do it, come back for the next. The rest of the page is the reference behind them.

1. Draw the walls

   Click 🧱 Add Wall, click a start point, point the mouse the way the wall runs, type its length and press Enter. Start with the left-hand wall and go clockwise: cabinets go on the right-hand side of a wall as you draw it, so clockwise keeps that side facing into the room. Right-click or Esc stops drawing. Right-click a wall for ⓘ Property — length, height, type (Normal, Island or Double: an island wall gets a front and a back elevation, a double wall carries cabinets on both faces with an elevation for each), and each end Open, Close 90° or Straight 180°. Close 90° adds a 31½″ return wall at a right angle; Straight 180° adds one that carries straight on, so a run can change height partway along. Group height changes every connected wall at once.

   Create walls · 1:36Wall properties

2. Or close it into a room

   Keep adding walls until the last one meets the start point and the room closes. If a side is open to the dining room, draw it anyway and delete it once the room is closed. Then click the name at the left of the tool strip, give the design a name, and 💾 Save. Walls start locked: you can select one and retype its numbers, but not drag it until you click Walls locked (the brick-wall button) on the tool strip.

   Create a room · 0:50

3. Put in the windows and doors

   Turn on ▤ Elevation and choose which walls it shows with the Walls list at its top right: S shows one wall, M shows every ticked wall side by side, and an unticked wall is left out of the exported PDF too. Open ▦ Catalog → Openings, drag a window onto the wall, then click the gap number beside it and type the distance you measured. Right-click the window → Property for its exact size and the 3D model it uses. Doors work the same way.

   Add a window and a door · 1:46

4. Centre the sink base under the window

   Type sb into the Filter catalog box to list the sink bases and drag one onto the wall. Select it and its panel opens with Center on window at the top: one click on Align to current window centres it (pick the window first if that wall has several).

   Add a sink base · 0:24

5. Add the appliances

   Catalog → Appliances has the stoves, dishwashers, fridges, cooktops and hoods. Drag each one to where it goes on the plan, then right-click → Property to change the model or the size — a fridge’s height, for instance.

   Add appliances · 1:25

6. Let AI Design lay out the cabinets

   Place the sink, the fridge and the stove first; AI Design builds around them (if one is not on the plan yet, it asks: Has one or None). Click AI Design, tick the walls that should get cabinets — an unticked wall is treated as an auxiliary wall and stays empty — and press Generate designs. After a few seconds you can compare several complete layouts side by side; press Use prefer design on the one you like. It places the cabinets together with the countertops, the backsplash and the top moulding — to reshape a countertop yourself, see Draw the countertops, below. Then choose a finish under Door Colors, switch to 2D to delete or swap individual cabinets, and use the single-wall elevation to check each run.

   AI Design · 1:56

7. Adjust it by hand

   To change a cabinet, delete it and look at the gap it leaves. Type a code such as b24 or w12 into Filter catalog — or browse Base Cabinets, Wall Cabinets grouped by height, and the corner cabinets — and drag it into the opening. 📏 Measure checks the distance between two cabinet edges, and Move Object in the right sidebar nudges by an exact Step with its arrows. An end panel dragged from the catalog snaps into the space beside a cabinet; move the cabinets over first to make room.

   Search the catalog · 1:51Move by an exact amount · 1:02Snap in an end panel · 0:22

8. Draw the countertops

   Click ▭ Countertop, switch to Sketch and press Draw countertop, then click the cabinet corners in order to trace each top; trace the island separately so it becomes its own slab. Pick a backsplash, press Generate 3D, and look at it in 3D, where clicking an edge sets its overhang or a waterfall. Back on Dimensions is the drawing for the fabricator. Would rather not trace? In 3D, the Flip Board’s Countertop page builds them for you with Countertop + Backsplash under Auto-generate (3D) — it needs an account rather than a guest session, and a free account gets three a day, counted together with Auto add Top / Bottom Molding. The countertop tool has its own page.

   Draw countertops · 1:12An L and an island · 0:49Overhang, waterfall, finish · 0:46

9. Finish the top with moulding

   In a wall’s elevation, click the top moulding and choose Edit in Top View to set its depth and width. Each end has two buttons — one changes the width, the other adds or removes the return down the side — and Extend Left stretches it over an end panel. Flat doors get the TF top trim by default; with Shaker doors you can switch to CM8 or another profile. On a wall with no moulding yet, select the wall and click Add Top Molding, then check the corners in 3D.

   Edit the top moulding · 1:47

10. Box in a bulkhead, if your ceiling has one

    In 3D, right-click the ceiling button and choose Show bulkhead, hide ceiling so you can see what you are doing. With Edit 3D on, click Box: a box appears at the ceiling — that is your bulkhead. Its Box settings take the exact width, depth and height you need to box in the ductwork, plus its shape and what it attaches to, and Move and Rotate line it up into a corner. For anything that is not a plain box, Edit Shape (2D) in its properties opens the top-view editor, where you drag the corner handles into a partial soffit. Tick Stands on the floor and the same box becomes a pipe chase or pony wall that counts as wall: cabinets stand in front of it, the countertop starts at its face, and the backsplash runs up to its top and no further. Right-click it in 3D to put a countertop on its top, or a backsplash on one of its sides.

    Add a bulkhead in 3D · 3:20Walls and bulkheads in 2D · 3:15

11. Save, organise and export

    💾 Save writes back to the design you opened. ⧉ Save As under a new name makes a copy; keep the same name and it saves into the design you already have. ＋ New on the tool strip starts over, and 📂 Load opens your library, where New folder and Move to folder keep projects sorted. ⬇ Export → Preview PDF shows the drawing set — tick the pages you want, Shoot a 3D photo of the view you like, reorder with Move page down, and Save Local downloads the PDF.

    Save, load and export · 2:53The PDF

Two regions, and no menu bar

The first thing to unlearn: there is no menu bar across the top, and nothing down the left. The whole tool lives in two places, and once you know which is which you can find any control in a second.

• The canvas — the plan in 2D or the room in 3D. A tool strip floats along its top, and the elevation drawing docks underneath it when you turn that on.
• The right sidebar — everything else: the logo, your account, the language picker and theme, 🤖 AI Design, the 2D / 3D switch, the Move Object pad and a preview of whatever you have selected — and, in 3D, the Flip Board of colours and finishes. The catalog sits docked in this sidebar — it gives way to the Properties of whatever you select, and can be floated as its own window — and the quote opens from the tool strip.

That sidebar collapses with the chevron on its inside edge, which is worth doing on a laptop when you want the plan as big as possible. And the 2D / 3D button always names the mode you are going to, not the one you are in — if it says “Switch to 3D”, you are looking at the plan.

Pick a shape, or draw your own walls

The way in. The designer opens on a sign-in card with four doors, all free: Google, Apple, a six-digit code sent to your email (no password to invent), or Try it as a guest — no account, up to two saved designs, kept for seven days after your last visit. Then it asks How would you like to begin? Freeform gives you a blank canvas (New) or your library (Load). Guided · about 10 min builds your own kitchen with you from the first wall to a price, pointing at each button and checking every step before it moves on; if you have used 2020, SketchUp or IKEA’s planner, it starts with a table of where your old tools live here. And if you closed the tab last time without saving, an Unsaved · continue card brings the draft back. Tick Don’t show this again today to go straight in.

Once you are in, there are two ways to get walls on the screen, and both end up in exactly the same editable plan.

From a template. The start page offers Single Wall, L, U, G and Single + Island. Choose one and you get a small dialog asking for each wall’s length and your ceiling height, with a Rotate button if the shape is mirrored from yours. Everything you type is in inches, and every wall stays adjustable afterwards — the template is a head start, not a commitment.

Drawing your own. Hit 🧱 Add Wall in the tool strip and a length bar appears. Type a length and press Enter to drop each wall, using the direction buttons — → Right ↓ Down ← Left ↑ Up — or the turn buttons ↺90 ↺45 180 straight ↻45 ↻90 to change direction as you go. There is an angle box in degrees for anything that is not a right angle, and holding Shift lets you draw at a free angle. Click Add Wall again — or press Esc — to finish.

Selecting a wall shows its Properties in the right sidebar; right-clicking it and choosing ⓘ Property… opens the same sheet as a window. That is where you set its length, name, height, thickness, whether it is a normal wall, an island or a double-sided wall, which side the design runs on, whether it carries a bulkhead (and how deep), and how each end closes.

The catalog, and the one behaviour that confuses everybody

Open ▦ Catalog in the tool strip and you get a searchable, drill-down tree:

Two faster routes exist. The 🔍 Filter catalog box at the top of the catalog takes anything — window sink B24 BER36 — and the results are draggable straight onto the plan. And with a cabinet selected, the Quick-add panel appears: press a bare arrow key to choose the side (↑ above, ↓ below, ← left, → right), which also jumps the cursor into the SKU box so you can type the code and hit Enter.

Windows and doors work the same way — drag them onto a wall, then use the editor that appears to set width, height, height off the floor and the gap either side. Cut-outs come in four ready sizes: drag one on, then set its exact width and height in its Properties.

The mouse and trackpad rules worth learning once

• Left-drag on empty space is a marquee, not a pan — sweep a box to select several items at once.
• Panning has three gestures — a middle-button drag, two fingers on a trackpad, or the space bar held down while you drag. The wheel and a pinch both zoom. Full list in the box below.
• Ctrl (or ⌘) + click adds and removes items from a multi-selection.
• Alt + click repeatedly peels down through stacked items — the fastest way to grab something hiding under a wall cabinet. Clicking an already-selected wall cabinet that covers an appliance also drops to the appliance, and clicking again pops back up.
• Alt + arrow keys hop the selection to the next item in that direction — quicker than aiming at a crowded plan.
• Click a GAP number and type the gap you want. With an item selected on that wall, clicking the dimension asks for a width in inches and slides the item until the gap is exactly that.

The designer works out which device you are on from the way the scroll arrives, and a wheel mouse keeps zooming exactly as it always did. If it ever guesses wrong — a wheel that slides the plan instead of zooming, or a trackpad that zooms when you wanted to slide — pin it down by hand in ⚙ 2D Settings → Plan View → Pan & Zoom Input: Auto Mouse Trackpad. The choice is remembered in that browser.

For precise moves, open Move Object in the right sidebar: a direction pad for forward, back, left, right, up and down, and a Step box that accepts decimals, fractions or both — 1.5 11/16 1 11/16 all work. Below it, 📦 Pack gathers the selected items (or everything, if nothing is selected) into one group you can move and rotate together with ⟲ ⟳ and a degrees box.

Right-clicking a cabinet gives you the option a drag cannot: ✥ Move (click new spot) picks the item up and drops it wherever you click next — including onto a different wall. Right-click or Esc cancels.

Every button along the top of the plan

Publish is not on this strip: use the globe on the design’s card in Load, or Publish in the 3D toolbar with Edit 3D on. The design’s name sits at the left of the strip and reads — not saved — until you save it; click it to rename. When the window is too narrow for the whole strip, it folds into an All tools button (a grid icon) that opens every tool in a panel; the lock at the end of the strip (it is in that panel too) keeps the strip open with a scroll bar instead.

Inside 2D Settings are the controls most people never find and then cannot live without: Smart Snap and Point Snap with their own thresholds, a Corner Cab Magnet distance (turn it down when you want to park a corner cabinet just off the corner), SKU names in the top view instead of item numbers, the elevation detail level, and Elevation Auto-Switch — which makes the elevation follow whatever you select, and which you turn off when you want it to stay on one wall. Hover a setting’s name and a small animation shows you what it does.

The drawing your installer actually wants

The elevation is a straight-on view of one wall, and it is where you check heights, door faces and how a run reads. Turn it on with ▤ Elevation from either 2D or 3D; it docks below the plan and you can drag the divider to resize it. Reading one properly — and knowing what to check before you sign it off — is its own page.

• S / M switch between a single wall and several walls side by side.
• Each wall gets a name button. Right-click one to rename or delete that wall — the wall’s Property sheet has the same Name field.
• Drag a cabinet horizontally to slide it along the wall, or vertically to raise or lower it; the axis locks once you commit to a direction. Hold Shift to ignore point snapping.
• Same mouse rules as the plan: left-drag marquees, middle-drag pans, Esc deselects.
• The detail level (in 2D Settings) goes from plain boxes to door and drawer faces, to the real door profile of the colour you picked, to a full hidden-line construction drawing.

The toolbar you have to go looking for

And there is a second twist: the toolbar has two halves that swap. With Edit 3D off you get the viewing tools; turn Edit 3D on and those are replaced by the editing tools. If a button you remember has vanished, that is why. Three stay put in both halves: Edit 3D itself, Lock toolbar, which keeps the bar from hiding, and 📍 Comment, which pins a note to a spot (it appears once the design is saved).

Rendering deserves its own note. Render opens a small panel first — composition, brightness, and a choice of four furnishing previews — and nothing is shot until you press Start render; to change the view, close the panel and reframe. The render takes a few minutes on our render machine, and finished photos land in your Album, where you can open one to adjust its colours for free or run an AI Photo Enhancement on it (that uses GH Coins). On a free account or as a guest they are kept for about two hours, so download the ones you want; with a membership, or a Studio account, they are kept while that account is active, and for at least 180 days after a membership ends; on a Designer account they are kept for 180 days, and in the last 60 days each one shows the date it will be deleted — download them, or move them to Google Drive, to keep them longer.

Three places you can measure, and they behave differently

There is a ruler in the plan, a ruler in the elevation and a ruler in 3D. The first two are the same tool, armed by one button and working in both drawings. The third is a different tool that happens to share the icon. Measuring the room itself is a different job — that is the measuring chapter.

Numbers that appear on their own

The ruler is for a question you ask once. For the ones you ask constantly there is a second thing, behind a right-click rather than a click: right-click 📏 Measure (in 2D or 3D), or use the 📐 Auto dimensions row at the bottom of the Measure card. It has three settings and it ships on Off, because most of the time you are not measuring.

Those grey numbers are throwaway readings: they follow the selection, vanish with it, and are left out of exports. Click a grey chip and it turns teal and stays — from then on it is yours, it follows the cabinet as it moves, it saves with the design and it prints. Delete it and the grey one comes straight back. Along a wall the grey numbers keep out of the way of the gap labels that are already there, and a cabinet’s own wall never gets a pointless 0″.

Selecting several items does not multiply this: the plan draws four dimensions around the whole group, whether you picked five cabinets or thirty. In the elevation a selected item gets one horizontal row under the drawing, showing the gap on each side of it; the elevation grows to make room for that row rather than squashing the drawing. Shift + D mutes every dimension on screen at once when you want a clean look, and a reload brings them back.

Space check — what it looks at, and what it does not

The third setting, Space check (beta), turns on a layer that reads the drawing back to you. It is deliberately small. Two rules are live, chosen because their answers are not a matter of taste:

• Doorway clearance. Every door claims a square in front of it as wide as the door. Anything standing on the floor inside that square gets the square painted amber — the same judgement the designer already makes when you drop a cabinet there, only now it stays on the screen instead of flashing past. Wall cabinets and range hoods are exempt: they clear a walker's head.
• Walkway width. The gap between two things that face each other across a passage, red under 36″. One aisle is one line, not one per cabinet — eight cabinets facing an island give you a single “31½″”, the narrowest point.

A panel in the corner of the drawing lists the results in five parts: what needs attention, what could be better, what it measured and was happy with, what does not apply to this design (with the reason in plain words — “there is no door drawn”), and, folded away, the six rules it does not check yet — the work triangle, clearance in front of appliances, counter landing space, wall-cabinet height, hood height, and drawers hitting doors. They are named rather than silently missing, because a half-written rule reads exactly like a rule that passed. Three of the six — counter landing space, wall-cabinet height and hood height — are now looked at by Design check, below, and so are doors and drawers that meet in a corner; the work triangle is not checked by either.

Click a row and the drawing jumps to it. A red row offers Fix to 36″, which moves the thing that can move through the same path a drag uses — and says “it cannot move” rather than pretending, when nothing there can. In 3D the same two rules show as translucent volumes you can walk the camera through, and in the elevation a blocked doorway is banded in its own column. The walkway rule draws nothing in the elevation: it is a distance across the floor, and there is no honest way to show it there.

None of this is saved, and none of it reaches a photo, a 3D export or a PDF — unless you ask. The export dialog has a Space check box that starts unticked every time; tick it and the PDF gets one appendix page listing everything, green and not-applicable included, headed by the two sentences that matter: these are common reference sizes rather than your local building code, and this version checked two things.

Design check — what it looks at, and what it does not

Space check is a layer you leave on while you work. Design check is the other kind of second opinion: a list you ask for when you want one, from its own button on the 2D tool strip — the clipboard with a tick, just before Quote. It reads the plan and every wall’s elevation against published planning rules — the NKBA kitchen planning guidelines, appliance installation guides and building-code clearances — for appliance openings and clearances, fillers and corners, ceilings, windows and doors, counter landing space, aisles and overhangs, and puts everything it finds in one list.

• Three levels, the serious ones first. A must-fix item carries no label: you know it by its red-orange dot and its place at the top — a cabinet that will not fit, something unsafe, something that has to change. Amber items end in please confirm: probably wrong, so check them against your room and your appliances. Tan items end in worth a look: suggestions. Even a sound kitchen usually collects a few of those last two.
• Show beside an item takes you to it: back to 2D, with that wall’s elevation open and the cabinet selected. The check itself changes nothing — there is no fix-it button, and the change is yours to make.
• Before a 3D Tour the same check runs when you press Start, and it stops you only when something must be fixed. Fix the design spends no GH Coins and keeps the viewpoints you picked; Start anyway goes ahead, and those items will not stop it again in that browser tab.

What it does not do: it is a reference, not your local building code, and an empty list is not an approval. It works from the numbers you typed, so it cannot see a ceiling that dips or a wall that bows; it has no install sheet for the appliances you will actually buy, so anything that depends on the exact model stops at please confirm; and it does not look at the work triangle, or at anything fitted inside a cabinet. A design with no walls drawn — a blank one, or an older design built from one of the preset layouts — gives it nothing to read, and it says so: Nothing to check yet, draw the walls first. And nothing it finds is saved with the design or printed in the PDF.

The plan — four modes, and every pick lands on something

Pick a mode and start clicking. Pressing 📏 Measure again only closes the card; while the tool is armed, the card ends with ↩ Done — measurements stay.

Every pick has to grab real geometry: cabinets, appliances and bulkheads offer their footprint corners and edges, rotated as they sit, and a click on bare floor is refused — the cursor turns to the blocked ring and nothing is placed. The snap radius is about 20 canvas pixels, roughly ten on a Retina screen, so get close to what you are aiming at.

• A drawn wall offers its two ends and its centreline, and that centreline is the room-side face — the surface a cabinet back rests against. The preset layouts have no drawn walls at all, so there is nothing wall-shaped to catch in the two-click modes, though Item centre → Walls still finds the three faces of a preset room.
• Countertops, doors and windows, mouldings, chairs, lights and decorations do not snap in the plan, and neither do sinks or cooktops — those are drawn by the base cabinet hosting them, so measure that cabinet.

What you get is a thin dimension line with open ticks and a rounded chip on its midpoint carrying the number — in fractions of an inch down to 1/16″, 36½″, the same way the rest of the designer talks. Set the length unit to millimetres in Design Preference and every one of these reads in millimetres instead; the stored value is the same either way, so switching back and forth converts rather than rounds. A distance that will not sit exactly on the display grid gets a dotted underline, and hovering it gives you the exact figure. Item centre → Walls lays two annotations, one per side, and a side with no wall in reach is not drawn.

Double-click a number and you can type a new one. The item moves so the distance becomes true, through the same placement path a drag uses — it collision-checks, it carries paired items along, and it undoes in one step. Not every number can be typed into: one measured between two things that are both fixed, or one anchored to a corner cabinet, is read-only and says so when you try.

On a touch screen there is no double-click, so long-press the number instead — you get a two-row menu, Change this number and Delete this measurement. A right-click does the same thing with a mouse, in the plan and in the elevation both. And in the elevation, the two halves of an Item centre → Walls row are editable the same way: type a new left-hand number and the item slides along the wall until that is true.

Measurements stay on the canvas, as many as you like.

• Each one is anchored to the thing it snapped to, so it follows that item and goes when it goes. Changing the mode keeps every finished measurement and only drops the half-finished pick.
• Click one and it turns amber; drag it clear of the drawing and it locks to one axis, trailing dashed witness lines, with the number unchanged.
• Delete removes the selected one whether the tool is on or off — with nothing selected it does nothing, so you cannot wipe a cabinet while you are measuring. With the tool off, the number chip is the only part you can click, not the line: click the number, then Delete.
• While the tool is armed the drawings are locked, the way Note mode locks them — no selecting, dragging or marquee until you put the ruler down.
• They are saved with the design. Close the tab, open the project tomorrow, and they are still on the same edges. One whose cabinet is missing from the saved file comes back greyed out instead of quietly disappearing. Undo still does not reach them — use Delete.
• When there are more numbers than there is room, the drawing does not turn to soup. A chip slides along its own line first, then steps off it on a thin leader, and only then folds into a small dot with a +N badge you can click to see what folded. Anything you measured or pinned yourself is never what folds, and an export is never thinned — the PDF gets all of them.
• Esc clears a selection or a half-finished pick, a second Esc puts the tool down, and a right-click does the same two steps — which is why the usual right-click menu stays away while you measure.

The ▭ Countertop page is the exception, and really a fourth ruler: the same button opens the same card there, minus the Item centre → Walls row, and the picks snap to the countertop outline you drew. Those measurements are part of the design — they survive a save and Undo reaches them.

The elevation — same button, its own half-finished pick

There is no separate elevation ruler: one button arms both canvases. Each keeps its own half-finished pick, though, so a first click in the plan can never pair with a second click in the elevation. Everything else behaves as above.

• Everything the elevation drew snaps by its corners and edges: cabinets, appliances, windows, doors, cut-outs, bulkheads, toe kicks and trim runs. This is where you go for a window, since the plan will not give you one.
• Every wall column adds four room lines — floor, ceiling and the column’s two ends — so a cabinet edge can be measured down to the floor or across to the end of the run.
• Item centre → Walls draws one row here, not two: a line spanning the wall face to face, with a tick at the item’s centre and a number on each half — 40½″, in the same fractions as everywhere else. Auto dimensions adds its own row the same way, in grey, and gets out of the way if you have already pinned a row for that item.
• An annotation on a wall you are not showing is hidden, not deleted. Hiding a wall is not a way to clear measurements.

3D — face to face, edge to edge, and a tape measure

Turn Edit 3D on first. With it off the Measure button is not on the toolbar at all — that is why you cannot find it. The button cycles through four states: F face to face, E edge to edge, P point to point, and off. A green message tells you which one you are in, and Esc puts the tape down from any of them, so you never have to click your way around the cycle to stop measuring.

Face mode reads the perpendicular gap between two parallel faces — cabinet side to wall, appliance front to island — and edge mode does the same for two parallel edges. In those two the picks really must be parallel: more than about ten degrees apart is refused with a warning. You see it coming, because the face or edge under the cursor is outlined live, teal when the click will work and amber when it cannot pair with the pick you already have.

P is the tape measure, and it has none of those rules: click any two points and it gives you the straight distance between them, plus the angle off horizontal when the line is not level. It also reaches things the other two cannot — the countertop, the floor and the ceiling are all fair targets for the tape, though they are still not targets for face and edge mode, and never for snapping.

• In face mode whatever is outlined is what gets measured, chamfers and mitred ends included. Edge mode is coarser: it offers only the twelve edges of the item’s box — the cabinet’s own turned footprint, a plain upright box for walls and appliances — so a mitred end or a door chamfer is not an edge you can pick, and a click too far from any of them answers No measurable edge here.
• In face and edge mode the ray sees cabinets, appliances, hanging lights, drawn walls and bulkheads. The walls of a preset layout are not targets, and neither are chairs or decorations. The countertop, floor and ceiling answer only to the tape.
• A press that travels more than a few pixels counts as orbiting and places no pick — click cleanly, or the camera moves and nothing is measured.
• The first pick shows as a small teal ① badge, and the result is a teal line with a pill reading the distance in fractions down to 1/16″ — 24½″, ¾″, 36″.
• Right-click in 3D is not the cancel it is in the plan — it is a move. On a cabinet or appliance it offers “📐 Snap this face onto…”, and the next left-click is the target the item travels to; the move runs through the normal placement path, so it collision-checks and undoes in one step, and only a wall-hung cabinet changes height. On a wall or a bulkhead, which cannot move, you get the ordinary 3D menu instead — and a right-click while a snap is armed cancels that snap.

The 3D numbers are editable too. Right-click one and you can type a new distance, close the gap to 0″ in one click, or — when both ends are cabinets — switch which end moves. It travels through the same placement path as a drag, so it collision-checks and undoes in one step, and the number afterwards reflects what actually happened: if a bulkhead capped the height or a neighbour blocked the slide, you see the distance it really reached, not the one you asked for.

You can leave several measurements up at once — a dozen, after which the oldest drops off and a note tells you how many went. Measuring the next one no longer wipes the last, and neither does a successful snap. Right-click one of the teal numbers and you can delete just that one, or 📌 pin it onto the plan, which drops the same distance into the 2D top view where it saves with the design like any other annotation. A measurement that stands straight up cannot be pinned that way — on a plan it would be a dot — and it says so rather than drawing a 0″. What stays in 3D is overlay only: not saved, and not in the picture when you shoot the view. A click on nothing puts down the half-finished pick, a change of mode clears the lot, and so does Esc.

Measure and 🗒 Add Note cannot both be armed, because they want the same clicks. Both survive a reload now, so the choice between them is about what you mean: a note is a sentence to whoever opens the file, a measurement is a number the drawing has to keep true. The plan and elevation pages of a PDF are drawn by the same code that paints the screen, so those measurements print — every one of them, including any the screen folded away — while the grey automatic ones and the 3D overlay do not. Neither ruler has a shortcut out of the box, though both can be bound to a key in Settings.

Colours, counters, floors and finishes

The right sidebar in 3D is where the kitchen stops being grey. Each icon is a page:

One more thing worth knowing on the Molding page: the auto-generate toggles are a 3D preview only. The two ➕ Auto add buttons underneath are what create real mouldings — the kind that appear in the item list, in the elevation and in the quote.

Most of the power is in the context menus

If you only learn one habit, make it this one: right-click the thing you want to change. The menu is different for every kind of object, and it is where the detailed work happens.

• On a cabinet — rotate 90° or 45°, ⓘ Property, ✥ Move to a new spot, move or reset its label, put a countertop on it, add or remove crown and light rail, toggle the toe kick, add a 12″ cabinet on top, and add a hood underneath. To delete a cabinet, select it and press Delete. Side fillers and end panels appear here too, labelled with the real gap they will fill. On the cabinets that take them, 🔩 Hardware… adds bins, trays and pull-outs and 💡 Lighting… sets strip lights.
• On a sink base — a one-click width swap between the sink-base sizes, plus add or remove a modern sink and faucet.
• On a pantry — flip the short door to the top, and add trim sized to the cabinet’s height.
• On an appliance — rotate, add an end panel either side, add a cabinet on top, property, delete.
• On a wall — the property sheet: name, length, height, normal, island or double, which side the design runs on, bulkhead, and how each end closes.
• On a countertop edge — the edge type (○ double 1½″, △ single ¾″, c/c clean cut against a wall), its overhang, and on exposed side edges, a waterfall.
• On a DIY countertop piece (in the countertop page’s Sketch view) — add a sink cut-out (30×16) or a cooktop cut-out (29×20), then drag it along the edge or click any of its four numbers to type an exact dimension. → Make countertop (3D) turns the piece into a real top that Generate 3D will build; cut-outs drawn on the DIY piece do not carry over.
• On a bare wall in Edit 3D — ➕ Add Backsplash, then push each of its four edges in or out an inch at a time.
• On empty space — right-click is the universal cancel: it puts down a painter, abandons a pending Move, ends the wall-drawing tool and clears a half-finished measurement.

When two things sit on top of each other — a crown and a light rail are only a few pixels apart — the menu asks which one you meant first.

AI Design, next-step suggestions and voice

AI Design lays out a whole kitchen for you, and it asks before it guesses. Click 🤖 AI Design and the planner opens on which walls to build on — tick the ones that get cabinets; an unticked wall stays empty. If the plan has no sink, stove or fridge on it yet, a Not on the plan row asks about each one: Has one keeps a plain cabinet in its spot so the layout leaves room for it, None designs the kitchen without it. Nothing there blocks you. An optional cabinet budget comes next, then Generate designs returns up to four complete layouts to Compare, and Apply this design puts the one you like on the plan. If you want more say before it runs, Advanced setup › still holds the older controls: pin where the stove, fridge, sink, dishwasher, a pantry or an island should go, set the wall-cabinet height (or Auto, taken from your ceiling), or flip the base-only switch that skips the uppers altogether. It lays out the cabinets and the top moulding; the countertops it leaves to you, to trace with ▭ Countertop or build with Countertop + Backsplash on the Flip Board’s Countertop page.

AI Suggestion is the smaller version, on the 3D toolbar with Edit 3D on. The first time, you pick the walls it should work on, right in 3D — each wall you switch on shows a dashed outline of the rough layout — and, under Advanced options, the upper-cabinet height, for the whole room or wall by wall when a bulkhead makes one wall lower; N of M walls › at the top of its panel takes you back to change them. Then it suggests the next cabinet — which SKU, which wall, how far along — and tells you why. By default it works in the order a kitchen designer would: the sink, then the stove or cooktop, the fridge, the corner, and then each gap that is left, with the wall cabinets once the base row is done. Cabinets you placed yourself are locked, so it builds around them. A steps box lets it place several in a row, and it will ask you a question when the answer genuinely depends on how you cook — or, when there is no sink on the plan, which wall it goes on, with Not needed here to skip it.

🪄 Design Helper takes plain language, typed or spoken: “place BER36 here”. The trick is the anchor — hover the mouse over the spot in 3D first and the target pins itself, so you can take your time typing. Press F5 to talk instead. It lives inside Edit 3D, so turning it on turns Edit 3D on too.

To start from a file rather than an empty room, members, designers and our sales team have 📐 Import in Load: it opens a .kit file from 2020 Design, or a design exported from Flip Kitchen as .json.

Save, load, export and the quote

• Saving needs an account or a guest session. Sign in and your designs are kept for good — up to ten on a free account, a hundred with a membership or a Designer account, three hundred on Studio; at the limit, delete an old one before saving a new one. Choose Try it as a guest and up to two designs stay on that device for seven days after your last visit. The first save asks for a project name and mints an ID and a share link, copied to your clipboard automatically. Every later save writes back to that same project.
• Save As with a new name makes a copy and leaves the original alone; keep the same name and it saves into that same design. To branch a design and try something without losing the original, give it a new name — Plan B — first.
• Load opens the design library: folders you can create and drag designs into, a search box that takes a name or an ID, sorting, and a grid or list view. Hovering a name shows its thumbnail.
• Export lets you tick which sheets go in — elevation, top view, countertop drawing, a 3D photo, render photos, even pictures from your own computer — preview the page order, drag to reorder it, then save a PDF. Save Local works without signing in. Export stays greyed out until the design has a name.
• Publish shares the design in the public community gallery — from the globe on the design’s card in Load, or from Publish in the 3D toolbar with Edit 3D on. Either way, the design you have open is saved first, so what people see is current.
• A share link is for looking. It ends in a random code, not the design’s ID, and whoever you send it to can open the design without an account — to look around 2D, the elevations, the countertop page and 3D, to measure and, signed in, to leave 📍 comments — but not to change or save it. Make a new link, on the card that appears when you copy it, stops the old one. The design itself stays private: by its ID it opens only for you, a designer or installer you hired through Community, people you invite, our sales team once you give them the ID (IDs are random, so nobody can guess one), and — once it is published — anyone. To go through a design with your partner or contractor, invite them from Chats & contacts → Contacts and they watch you work live, while you talk in the design’s own chat (This design, at the top of Chats) or on a voice call: designing a kitchen together. For something to keep, send the PDF.

The Quote on the tool strip keeps a running count of what your design contains — wall cabinets, base cabinets, pantry, accessories, and the countertop area — with a box for a coupon code and a summary at the bottom. It updates as you design, so you always know roughly where a change lands before you commit to it.

The keyboard

You can bind your own shortcuts to most toolbar buttons in Settings. A few are reserved and cannot be reassigned: undo, redo, Esc, Delete, Backspace and O.

Apple Pencil: why it stops working, in the order worth checking

The designer on this website is built for a computer, with a mouse or a trackpad, and on an iPad we do not recommend the browser version. The iPad has its own: the Flip Kitchen AI app, on the App Store in Canada. There, an Apple Pencil is the nicest way to draw a room — you trace the walls the way you would on paper. So it is worth knowing what to do the day the Pencil goes half-dead in the middle of a design, because the two most common causes are not on anybody’s troubleshooting list: a film on the screen, and a tip that has quietly unscrewed itself.

The five standard checks

• 1. Charge it, and confirm it is charging. A Pencil that attaches magnetically to the flat side of the iPad should pop up a little charge card within a second or two — no card means no charge is going in. The first-generation Pencil charges from the port instead: cap off, plug it in (with the small adapter on a USB-C iPad).
• 2. Confirm it is actually paired. Settings › Apple Pencil should list it with a battery level. If it is not there, it is not connected — and check Bluetooth is on, because a Pencil is a Bluetooth device and Airplane Mode kills it.
• 3. Forget it and pair again. Settings › Bluetooth, tap the ⓘ beside Apple Pencil, Forget This Device, then attach or plug it in again. A Pencil that was last used on a different iPad always needs this — it only talks to one at a time.
• 4. Restart the iPad, then update iPadOS. Dull advice, and it genuinely fixes a Pencil that has gone unresponsive after a long session.
• 5. Make sure it is the right Pencil for that iPad. Generations are not interchangeable: the ones that pair by attaching to the magnetic side will never pair with an iPad that expects the plug-in kind, and the other way round. If it has never once worked on this iPad, suspect the model before anything else.

A film on the screen — or on the iPad’s side

A screen protector sits between the tip and the glass, and the iPad reads the Pencil through that gap. A thin, well-fitted one is fine. A thick tempered-glass, matte or “paper-feel” film is not always: the line can lag behind the tip or sit slightly beside it, light strokes stop registering, and the last inch near an edge or a corner goes dead. Privacy and anti-glare films are the worst offenders — some carry a metallic layer that interferes with the digitizer directly.

• Location-dependent failure is the giveaway. Works in the middle, dies at one corner — that is a lifted edge, a bubble or trapped dust under the film, not the Pencil.
• Test it properly: peel one corner of the protector back and draw on the bare glass underneath. If that patch behaves, you have your answer.
• Do not forget the side of the iPad. A thick case, a folio flap or a wrap-around skin can hold a magnetic Pencil a millimetre off its charging strip — it then refuses to charge and keeps unpairing. Take the case off and attach the Pencil to bare aluminium to check.
• Or a skin on the Pencil itself. Wraps and grips over the flat face block the same connector, and anything over the front section stops double-tap being felt.

The tip is not screwed tight

The tip is a screw-on, replaceable part, and writing pressure slowly backs it off — most people never think to check it because it still looks attached. A tip that is a fraction loose loses solid contact with the pressure sensor behind it, and the result reads exactly like a failing Pencil: strokes that arrive in bursts, lines that only appear if you press hard, pressure that jumps, taps that do not register at all.

• Unscrew it all the way, then screw it back finger-tight. Snug, not forced — and make sure it goes on straight, because a cross-threaded tip behaves identically to a loose one.
• Replace a worn tip. Tips are consumables. If the point has gone flat or grey, wobbles even when tight, or the metal core is showing through, fit a fresh one — they come in packs of four.
• A third-party stylus is not the same thing. No pressure, no palm rejection, and it will mark the canvas with the side of your hand. If your “Pencil” came with a charging cable and no pairing step, this is what you have.

Symptom → likely cause

In one line each: nothing anywhere is a flat battery or a lost pairing; dead only near an edge is the film; bursts and hard presses are a loose tip; a line that lags or lands offset is a thick film; refusing to charge is a case in the way; and palm marks mean it is not an Apple Pencil at all.

One thing you can stop worrying about: an Apple Pencil never needs calibrating. If someone tells you to calibrate it, they are describing a different stylus. And if the tip, the film and the pairing are all ruled out and it still misbehaves, that is the point to book it in — not before.

Fifteen things you would otherwise find by accident

• 1. The 3D toolbar is hidden — push the cursor into the top of the view, or click the ≡ TOOLS pill.
• 2. Edit 3D swaps the entire toolbar. Missing buttons are on the other half.
• 3. In 3D nothing moves until Edit 3D is on — then a cabinet drags the instant you press.
• 4. Middle-drag pans. Left-drag marquees. That one catches everybody.
• 5. Alt+click again and again to peel down through stacked items.
• 6. Click a gap number and type the gap you want — the selected item slides to make it exact.
• 7. A render button opens its panel first — nothing is shot until you press Start render.
• 8. With Edit 3D on, press O to open every door and drawer in the room — the fastest sanity check on door swings.
• 9. Right-click cancels anything you have armed.
• 10. Format Painter off repaints everything; on paints one cabinet.
• 11. Clicking a catalog row only adds something when a cabinet is already selected — otherwise drag it.
• 12. The Move step box takes fractions: 11/16 and 1 11/16 are both fine.
• 13. Right-click a countertop edge for its edge type and overhang; right-click a DIY countertop piece to drop in a sink or cooktop cut-out.
• 14. Right-click a wall’s name button in the elevation to rename or delete that wall.
• 15. Ctrl+P opens Export. Ctrl+Shift+R wipes the design.