Using the Flip Kitchen Designer

No. The designer runs in your browser — open it and start drawing. There is nothing to install and no plugin, and you can lay out a whole kitchen in 2D and 3D before you ever make an account. Signing in only comes into it when you want to save, load, publish or export.

Three ways in, and they all end up in the same editable plan. Pick a shape on the start page — Single Wall, L, U, G or Single Wall + Island — and type your wall lengths and ceiling height. Draw your own walls with 🧱 Add Wall, typing each length and pressing Enter. Or upload a plan you already have: the 📎 button beside the Design Helper takes an image or a PDF and reads the walls and appliance positions out of it.

No — a template is a head start, not a commitment. Once you are in, select any wall and retype its length, or right-click it for the full property sheet: height, thickness, which side the design runs on, whether it carries a bulkhead. You can add and delete walls freely, and a room that is not a rectangle is fine — the wall tool has 45° and 90° turn buttons, an angle box in degrees, and free-angle drawing while you hold Shift.

Yes, and it asks before it guesses. 🤖 SW Design starts by asking which walls get cabinets, then where you want the stove, fridge, sink, dishwasher, pantry or island — none of them are compulsory, and anything you leave out it simply leaves out. It then generates up to four complete layouts to compare. SStep is the smaller version: it suggests the next single cabinet, tells you which wall and how far along, and explains why. SStep is free and needs no account; SW Design asks you to sign in and is free three times a day, then costs a coin a run (unlimited with a membership).

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

The 🔍 search box on the canvas takes a plain word or a code — window, sink, B24, BER36 — and the results drag straight onto the plan. Faster still: with a cabinet already selected, press a bare arrow key to open Quick-add on that side, which also drops the cursor into the SKU box so you can type a code and hit Enter.

The designer is loaded with the real catalogue — true widths in 3″ steps, correct heights and depths, real corner cabinets and fillers — and it refuses to overlap what is already there. That is why it can tell you exactly what is left over on a wall and label a filler with the real gap it will fill. What it cannot do is check your tape measure: the plan is only as good as the wall lengths you typed in, so measure each wall at three heights and use the smallest.

Two switches. In the plan, ⚡ Fast stops drawing the snap grid and the floor shadow (snapping itself keeps working). In the 3D room, the Quality button cycles 1 Fast · 2 Standard · 3 HD — drop it to 1 on an older laptop, since HD wants a decent graphics card. Collapsing the right sidebar with the chevron on its inside edge also buys you a bigger canvas.

Yes — ▭ Countertop produces a dimensioned drawing of every countertop run. Right-click an edge to set its profile and overhang, right-click the slab itself to drop in a sink or cooktop cut-out, then drag the cut-out along the edge or click any of its four numbers to type an exact dimension. The drawing goes into the PDF export as its own sheet.

Cabinets, gaps and every other dimension are in inches — that is what the catalogue is built in. Wall lengths are the exception: Design Preference carries a Wall length unit switch, so if you measured the room in millimetres you can type the walls that way and flip back afterwards. Switching converts them on the spot without moving anything, and once the room is drawn the designer nudges you to design in inch — worth listening to, because everything else is imperial. Inches you can type as decimals or fractions: 1.5, 11/16 and 1 11/16 all work.

It opens and renders in any modern browser, so a tablet is fine for showing someone the 3D. Designing is another matter: the tool is built around a pointer — dragging cabinets, sweeping a marquee selection and the right-click menus all assume one. A laptop trackpad is fine (two fingers pan the plan, a pinch zooms, space + drag pans anywhere); a touchscreen with no pointer is not. Plan on a laptop or a desktop and use the tablet to show it off.

Ctrl/⌘ + Z undoes and Ctrl/⌘ + Y redoes, or use ↺ and ↻ in the tool strip. One to be careful with: Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + R does not refresh the page here the way it does elsewhere in a browser — it wipes the design and reloads. Use the browser’s own reload button if that is what you meant.

Yes — 🗒 Add Note writes a note onto the plan or the elevation. One thing to know: while note mode is on, only notes can be moved, so if cabinets suddenly refuse to budge, that is why. Turn it off and the plan behaves normally again.

In Settings → ⌨ Shortcuts you can bind your own combination to around three dozen toolbar buttons: press Record, then the keys. A handful are reserved and cannot be reassigned — undo, redo, Esc, Delete, Backspace and O. Shortcuts are saved in that browser and take effect the next time you open the designer.

Kitchens are what it is built for, but vanities work: the catalog has a Vanity branch alongside base, wall and pantry cabinets, and the Flip Board has a Bathroom page of fixtures that drop onto the floor, the wall or the countertop. Wall-hung vanities carry their own mounting height.

That is the Flip Board in the right sidebar of the 3D view — a page each for Door Colors (including a custom paint colour on Shaker doors), Countertop, Floor (real flooring products, plank width, pattern and direction, or tile with its own grout), Wall, Hardware, Lighting and Molding. To recolour a single cabinet rather than all of them, turn on the 🖌 Format Painter first and the next colour you pick becomes a brush. The Slab Gallery button is worth a look too: it walks you through a 3D showroom of real countertop slabs, and anything you shortlist there shows up in the countertop swatches back in the design.

Slide two fingers on the trackpad and the plan moves with them, sideways as well as up and down; pinch to zoom. The gesture nobody forgets afterwards is space bar + drag — hold the space bar, drag anywhere on the plan, and it pans like the hand tool in a photo editor. That one works with a mouse, a trackpad, a trackball or a pen. A middle-button drag still pans if you do have a wheel mouse. All three gestures work the same way in the elevation and on the countertop drawing — one set to learn, not three. A wheel mouse keeps zooming on a plain scroll, exactly as before — the designer tells the two devices apart. If it ever guesses wrong, set it by hand in ⚙ 2D Settings → Plan View → Pan & Zoom Input: Auto, Mouse or Trackpad.