Best Software for Interior Design Presentations

It’s all about creating a design process that’s efficient, sensible, and enjoyable - and the most climactic moment of all is when your client sees their design presentation for the first time. You want to provide the highest quality design presentation possible so your client can clearly see and understand the vision you have for their space, and you also want to minimize the number of hours you or your team sit at a computer creating it! So, the choice of software for interior design presentations is key in streamlining this part of each project and ensuring a whole-hearted “WE LOVE IT! APPROVED!” from your clients. With so many software programs available to interior designers, it’s important to choose the right one based on the types of presentation drawings you typically produce and your comfort level with each platform.

In this blog post, we’ll highlight the best software for interior design presentations and share the project type each is most ideal for.

AutoCAD is still the program we see used most often for drawing floor plans and elevations. It is still the workhorse of design software. Its limitation is that you will not be able to produce 3-dimensional views into a space — unless you are working with AutoCAD 3D. And most people aren’t. Rather, they utilize the traditional version of AutoCAD, which only produces 2-dimensional plans, elevations, and line drawings. There is a “lite” version, which is sufficient for most design studios.

In the commercial design sector, the design community is really moving away from AutoCAD in favor of Revit, which has more robust capabilities, including the ability to get a 3-dimensional view of any part of the plan. But for most residential designers, Revit provides more capabilities than will be needed.

Many residential designers — especially those who do whole home design or space planning for new construction — use Chief Architect, which provides everything needed for these project types. You can produce floor plans and be immediately able to get 3D perspective views with customizable finishes and materials. There is an extensive library for furniture and accessory pieces. If your computer has sufficient capabilities, you will be able to produce photo-realistic quality renderings showing natural lighting coming through the windows that is time-of-day and climate-specific. And you can produce all construction documents with title blocks, schedules, legends, and full dimensions.

SketchUp Pro is another often used drawing and rendering program that’s great for floor plans, elevations, and 3-dimensional perspective views and renderings. This is a fairly intuitive and easy-to-learn drawing program that can easily produce a 3-dimensional view of any space. However, an add-on program is required in order to get photo-realistic quality renderings. SketchUp Pro does come bundled with an additional program, called Layout, that works in conjunction with SketchUp Pro to allow you to take your 3D SketchUp mode and make 2D dimensioned plans and elevations, as well as construction documents and presentation drawings.

Similar to Chief Architect and Sketchup is 2020 Design Live. This program is very specific to kitchen, bath, and closet design work. When plans are drawn, it is immediately possible to see the corresponding 3-dimensional perspective view or elevation view. This program can be synced with a cabinetry manufacturer’s catalog, so perspective views will show cabinetry details just as they will be manufactured. And a materials and parts list and pricing documents can be produced from the finished plans. Dimensioned plans and elevations, as well as a construction document sheet set, can be easily produced.

A fairly new drawing and rendering program for interiors is called Spoak. This drawing and rendering program is fairly intuitive, easy to use, and allows you to produce floor plans, 3-dimensional views with customizable colors and finishes, and mood boards.

Design Files and Houzz Pro, product management software programs specifically for interior designers, both have capabilities to produce scaled floor plans, 3-dimensional perspective views, and mood boards. The tools within these programs are intended to be intuitive and user friendly so designers can be up and running in no time, even if they don’t have formal training on the other software programs we mentioned. 

A note of caution though. If you need to produce a high-quality construction document sheet set — perhaps to submit for a building permit application — programs such as SketchUp Pro, Spoak, and Design Files may not be your best path. These programs have great capabilities for schematic design and conceptual renderings but are not intended for heavy construction document production. But, if you are looking for floor plans and rendering capabilities — mainly to communicate your design intent to a client — any of those mentioned above would be good choices. 

One big challenge with many of these rendering programs is being able to find the exact piece you’ve selected within the software’s library of furnishing pieces. Let’s say you selected a beautiful Baker end table but cannot find a pre-built table within the program library that looks exactly like it. And you don’t want to show a rendering with a dissimilar piece. 

Often, Photoshop allows the needed manipulation of images for use in renderings. In Photoshop, for instance, you can take an image of a chair, and “photoshop in” a different fabric or change the stain color to show a better representation of what it would really look like. You can also use Photoshop to manipulate a photograph of a client’s space to show the addition of elements, new flooring, new paint, the alteration of a piece - such as re-upholstery, new lighting or draperies, etc. Photoshop also allows you to add material imagery, color, or highlights and shadows to a floor plan or elevation line drawing. 

Once you have produced all images to present to your client — floor plans, layout options, furnishings images, color swatches, material samples, and perspective renderings — the next consideration is for a document software to put together your presentation pages. Adobe InDesign is an excellent choice with a huge range of capabilities for manipulating copy and images. Canva is also a great option to provide high-quality, professional looking page layouts. Microsoft Powerpoint, Google Slides, or Apple Pages are additional options, and are all very intuitive and easy to use. 

Most programs have online tutorials which provide training so you and your team can get up and running. You can also take standalone classes to learn a specific software program. Once you have a good level of proficiency, I suggest developing a template for your design presentations so you don’t need to start from scratch with each new client.

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