TechSoft created 2D Design for users who require sophisticated drawing and design features, but don’t want to spend a lifetime learning to use them. Although designed with professional capability, its ease of use means that 2D Design is the CAD standard for the vast majority of UK secondary schools. Whether you need to produce traditional engineering drawings, colourful ‘free-form’ designs for embroidery, or smart graphical presentation sheets, 2D Design V2 has been carefully developed to give you all the tools you need – and all in one place.
2D Design V2 offers thousands of exciting options for combining vector drawing with text, bitmaps, photographs or clip-art to create stunning graphic products. Comprehensive editing tools allow any image to be clipped to size and shape; bitmap images can be converted into a vector drawing; individual font characters can be customised; colour fills can be single colour, graduated, texture or pattern, etc. The options are endless – the texture fill could be used to simply render a drawing with a photograph of the material it will be made from; the pattern fill could become an application in its own right to design patterns for Sublimation work or embroidery.
The graphics elements of 2D Design V2 give the student all the tools they need to design packaging products, posters, point-of-sale displays, greeting cards, etc. In addition, 2D Design V2 provides an intuitive tool to compile design folder pages by importing photographs, scanned sketches and research material alongside CAD drawings – the possibilities are endless.
2D Design V2 makes an excellent electronic drawing board with an extensive range of tools to enable you to accurately draw and dimension anything from a nut and bolt to a super tanker. All the line-geometry, transformation, edit, attach and dimensioning tools are there.
If you are new to CAD, but familiar with conventional technical drawing, you will soon be producing work to meet any sector standard. Layers can be used for construction work, standard sheet templates, dimensioning or output to CAM, etc. There is no practical limit to the complexity of drawing 2D Design V2 is capable of doing. We supply numerous universities who find it gives them everything they need from a 2D CAD platform - it integrates easily with other packages and it provides a hassle-free way to output to CAM machinery.
A key feature of 2D Design V2 is the high level of
integration that has been built in between the output device and the
drawing stages of design.
When starting a drawing you will typically set your page size to suit
the machine you will be using - at its simplest level this means that
the design will ‘fit’ and you can position the job accurately on the
work area, but there is more to it than that. Once set, all the
particular features of that machine become available so, for example,
you can add registration marks ready for print-and-cut using
knife-cutting machines and you will see a dialog box to set up the
rotary table for a LaserCAM. When ready to output to many CAD/CAM
devices and all our Roland and LaserCAM machines, there is one simple
machine-specific dialog box to deal with and no tedious post-processing
to confuse matters.
Unlike many CAD packages, 2D Design V2 has a simple desktop that lets learners start with basic tools, adding new tools as their confidence grows. Everything about the software can be customised to suit different ages and abilities, and versatility means that learning can be built-in to any manner of project applications from KS2 onwards. By KS4, 2D Design V2 simply becomes a powerful tool for designing and making, and continues to be so into sixth form and beyond.
Site Licence
A Site Licence allows a school/college to install the software on any number
of computers on the school site.
Student Licence
A Student Licence allows a school/college to distribute a special
non-output version of the software to students and teachers for home
use. Students will be able to save work for output back at school.
Schools may choose to charge a nominal amount per student, to recoup
the cost.
Minimum Hardware Requirements
Windows XP / Vista / 7 / 8 / 10 / 11.
Microsoft recommended minimum hardware specification advised.
Network compatible (site licence only).
Ordering
In order to avoid software theft, the software is encrypted with the
name of the licensed user, typically the name of a person, or the
name of an individual establishment.
When ordering please state:
a) Name of licensed user/site (max 28 characters, including spaces).
b) Address for site licence if appropriate.