The Grid Designer is free to use . Your designs may be saved to the local storage of the browser you are working in. There is no login required . The link to the designer is: http://freese-works.com/griddesigner . The link to the home page for my blog is http://freese-works.com .

You may create a grid of up to 500 x 500 cells for each design. The cells of the grid can be either square or rectangular to correspond to whatever craft you are interested in. Multiple display options, such as numbering and mouse position, aid in working with your grid. Zoom in and zoom out are available as well as a zoom-full-picture that will size the grid to just-fit the editing window so that the complete design is visible.

The drawing tools include a pencil and eraser, for free-hand drawing, as well as a line tool, shape tool, fill tools, outline area tool and text tool. Line size can be modified from 1 to 10 cells in width, to make drawing on larger grids easier. Undo/Redo is unlimited for all drawing tools.

Figure 1 : Drawing Tools

The shape tool allows the creation of simple shapes such as rectangles, circles, triangles, hexagons, diamonds, etc. These shapes can be created as solid shapes of a single color, outlined shapes where only the outline is drawn, or filled shapes with an outline of one color and fill of another color.

Drawing tools use the selected foreground and background colors which are shown on the top toolbar. Foreground color is usually the color used to draw, while the background color is used to fill the grid initially and to erase with.

Figure 2 : Color Selection

You may also open a Floating Palette from the Display > Show Floating Palette option. This places a moveable window containing the foreground and background color selections. You may select foreground and background colors from the Floating Palette instead of using the foreground and background dropdowns on the top toolbar.

Select colors from many pre-defined palettes or add your own colors to any palette. Pre-defined palettes include many commonly used yarns, rug yarn, embroidery floss, etc. One custom palette is also provided where you can add any colors you would like to work with.

Figure 3 : Palette Feature

Complete support for selection , cut, copy, paste within the tool is provided. In addition, the paste contents can be modified with a series of tools that allow you to flip vertically and horizontally, invert colors, and rotate.

A library of small patterns that can be copied into your larger design is also available.

Color substitution is available, to aid in converting a design from one palette to another or just to switch one color for another in your open project.

Figure 4 : Ready to substitute

Figure 5 : Substitute white for blue

Projects can be created from scratch, by selecting either the Project à New Project option or the Project à Create from Image option.

The Project à Create from Image option has a full digitizer to convert any image/photo to a digitized pattern.