But it does the job, as I use it minimally for furniture plans. For that reason, I still use a version that is 10 years old. This is the most widely used program and a standard in the industry, but it is also very expensive. AutoCADĪutoCAD - The premier CAD program used by architects and engineers. There are lots of current students and recent graduates that are extremely proficient in CAD. This doesn't mean that you yourself have to know the programs if you're like me and they were never an integral part of your design education. Your interior design firm can't survive without using CAD for 3D renderings or 2D furniture plans. It wasn't until years later while working for Michael Smith that I took an AutoCAD class and really started using it regularly. Hand-drawing and drafting was still king and I had one class in drawing plans on the computer (which we saved on giant floppy zip disks). When I started in the architecture school at USC, computer aided design (CAD) was just beginning to be introduced into the curriculum.