Users love it simple. With Buuky, you can easily enable your employees to quickly find workplaces via maps and book offices easily and directly.
What do you need for that? Floor plans of your locations. How do you create them? We'll tell you in this blog post.
Tip: In the administration area of Buuky, you can easily upload site plans and place workstations via drag & drop. On Buuky Help we explain how it's done.
Two ways to create maps
In this blog post we would like to introduce you to two possible ways to create floor plans of your offices and locations.
Use existing floor plans, such as emergency plans.
Create a floor plan with a graphics program, for example draw.io.
1. Use what you already have.
The easiest way is already having plans of your offices and locations. If you want to be effective, you can simply use the emergency plans of the buildings. In most office buildings, these are also available digitally to the facility management.
Of course, you can still edit the emergency plans in a graphics program such as Photoshop, GIMP or Canva and add labels to them.
2. Create your own floor plan with the free tool draw.io.
If you want to create an individual room plan, free graphics programs like draw.io provide a simple solution. Even users who have little experience with graphics programs can easily create a floor plan. This is how it works:
Activate the floor plan shape library.
Open draw.io and click More Shapes at the bottom left. Now scroll down to the Other section and select Floorplans. Then click Apply.
Now you can use the floor plan shapes (along with the other standard shapes) for your room plan. After you open the drop-down menu at the bottom left, the floor plan shapes will appear.
When you hover over an element, a description of its purpose will appear.
Position the shapes on your floor plan.
Now you're ready to start designing your office floor plan. Here are the basics:
To add shapes to your canvas, you can click directly on the elements or simply drag and drop them from the library on the left to the desired position.
Guides and ruler: The background grid helps you resizing shapes to scale. Also, when you move shapes, guides are displayed to help you with fitting them to the other shapes. To display rulers at the edge of the canvas, choose View > Ruler from the menu.
First, it's best to create a series of walls according to the shape of your office. You can also extend the wall elements by clicking on the blue dots and dragging them to the desired length.
Next, you can add windows over the walls and add elements like desks and doors to detail your office space.
Resize the shapes: Drag one of the round blue handles on the outer edge of a shape or group of shapes.
Rotating shapes: Drag the round rotation icon until the shape is rotated in the correct direction.
Flip shapes: Select the shape and click on the Arrange tab in the panel on the right, then choose Horizontal or Vertical to flip the shape in the desired direction.
Move one shape behind another: Select the shape and click the Arrange tab in the panel on the right, then click on Move to Back. To bring a shape to the front, click Move to Front.
Create different floors.
Instead of creating one large and complex room plan, you can create a separate page for each floor in your office.
Click the + at the bottom left corner to add a new page. Double-click the name of the page to rename it.
Export your result.
When you're satisfied with the design of your room plan, you can export the file in the desired format. To upload the plan to Buuky, it is best to use a JPEG or PNG image file. In the menu, select File > Export as > JPEG / PNG.
In the opening window you can add shadows, this will give your floor plan a nice visual boost.
Click Export and boom -
Now you have a floor plan for your office, ready to upload to Buuky!