Nevron Diagram Designer

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on August 03, 2012

Nevron Diagram Designer is a sophisticated graphic app optimized for creating diagrams of all kinds. It's a free tool that also demonstrates a premium package, Nevron Diagram. Its download also includes Nevron Pipeline Editor, which lets users create complex pipeline diagrams by dragging and dropping elements from a library, and other apps on the Nevron Application Launcher. We focused on Diagram Designer, which is fully functional but places a watermark on saved diagrams.

Diagram Designer launches via the Nevron Application Launcher, which can be found in a Start menu folder called Nevron Diagram Sample Applications (or an optional desktop icon). Diagram Designer's user interface has what at first appears to be an extremely busy layout, with a gridded main window flanked by Library Browser and Property Browser panels under stacked layers of feature-packed toolbars. But these toolbars, also called Command Bars, are completely customizable and can be dragged and dropped into place and stacked and arranged any way you like; the toolbar panel automatically resizes to fit your new layout. Tool icons are colorful and show clear explanations when you hover your cursor, and they cover everything from Map Import to PDF, Autocad, Svg, Flash, and Silverlight Export. Diagram Designer offers a huge selection of shapes, connectors, and objects in its Library Browser as well as on toolbars. We could expand and pin open the Library Browser's various features, including selections of basic shapes as well as electrical symbols, floor plans, flags, travel and weather symbols, and much more. Diagram Designer saves diagrams in one of five proprietary formats.

Diagram Designer is easy to get started with. You can jump right in by creating a new diagram from scratch, but we clicked the Insert menu and opened the Template Wizard to start with an existing template -- in our case, a family tree. A Pan and Zoom preview pane let us zoom in on small sections to create large, detailed diagrams. Functionally, Diagram Designer is a lot like an all-around graphics app, with layers, tools, and lots of options (especially its export capabilities). There's a lot to learn, but it does a lot, too.