Design & Visualization

Design software focuses on the digital creation or re-creation of a thing or idea. Types of design range from print media, web site, computational, 3-dimensional, structural, simulation, and more. Simulation and modeling software is closely related and sometimes integrated with design software.

Visualization software includes applications that help visualize concepts, ideas, or scenarios. This includes diagramming, geographical visualization, molecular and structure visualization, graphical data representations, and some animation.

Also included in this category are applications used in presentations. This includes not only Powerpoint and powerpoint style presentations, but live polling software, presentation capture software, and web presentations as well. As well, applications used to create, edit, convert, or touch up digital images. Software ranges from photo editing, photo cataloging, graphic design, and diagramming. Finally there are applications used to edit web pages including code editors, What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editors, and Content Management (CMS) systems that organize and manage web pages on a server.

BlueGriffon

November 19, 2014 by Andy Voelker
Categories: Design & Visualization

bluegriffon-logo

Availability: Free Download
Comparable:  Dreamweaver

BlueGriffon takes a straightforward WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) approach to web editing, but also manages to include plenty of more powerful features.  It is based on the rendering engine of Mozilla Firefox.

You could just use it to type text, insert images, tables, audio files, videos and so on. But there’s also an SVG editor, form design tools, some CSS support, an accessibility checker, DOM Explorer, and more.

BlueGriffon is free but does utilize commercial plugins, so you may find that some features link you to a web store to purchase these plugins.

Tags: htmlweb development

Celestia

March 18, 2015 by Andy Voelker
Categories: Analysis & ModelingDesign & Visualization
Availability: Free Download
celestiaComparable: Google Earth, Starry Night Pro, Stellarium

Celestia is a free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.  All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A ‘point-and-goto’ interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.  Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that’s not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.

ChemDraw

December 19, 2013 by clas-web
Categories: Analysis & ModelingDesign & Visualization
Availability: Labs | Faculty/Staff | Download
Comparable:  

ChemDraw is a chemistry software tool that helps chemists create scientifically intelligent drawings for databases and publications. A free trial download and purchasable download is available for Windows and Mac devices.  Some features of ChemDraw include:

  • Chemical structure to name conversion
  • Chemical name to structure conversion
  • NMR spectrum simulation (1H and 13C)
  • Mass spectrum simulation
  • Structure cleanup
  • An extensive collection of templates, including style templates for most major chemical journals.
  • Export to SVG and PDF formats
Tags: trm