Map, Pencil, Calculator

Design

Drawing + Collaboration

  • Start creating with a few clicks.  Refine your idea in minutes. See actionable project data as you work.
  • Use the "Draw Bar" at the bottom of the screen to create something. Choose what you want to create in the dock, then start drawing by clicking on the map.
  • Create polygons, rectangles, lines, and points. Edit shapes with easy push and pull controls.
  • Sketch loosely, or when accuracy is important, you can create with precision.
Drawing
1 minute
All drawing functions are organized in an intuitive palette, ready to help you create anything.
Tools and Methods
1 minute
Giraffe is mainly about polygons - click to add nodes, click again to remove them.
Copy, paste, and undo just like you'd expect.
Buildings, Roads, and Landscape

1 minute
Draw buildings, roads and carparks, landscape and trees, or anything you like with a few clicks

Present

1 minute
Annotate your drawings for clarity. Add labels, markers, or custom annotations to your project. Then, save layer combinations and camera positions using the View tool.

Organise Scenarios

Comparing the areas, shadowing and footprint of different scenarios is a key part of design. Giraffe supports design options with drawing layers.

Collaborate

Work at the speed of conversation. Invite your whole team to collaborate and design in real-time. Once two or more participants enter a project simultaneously, the Live Cursor controls appear in the top bar, and on the map.

Data Analytics

Assumptions + Analytics

  • As you design and create, Giraffe works along side you calculating areas and ratios of every element you've made.
  • Giraffe connects the geometry you draw with the data you see through the concept of a Usage. Giraffe looks at the properties you have assigned to the elements and uses them to create reports.
  • Use Giraffe's templated reports in the Urban Tab, or build a custom, comprehensive cost plan in Analytics.
Properties

1 minute
Control your design’s performance with property values. Without properties, the geometry in Giraffe is just shapes.  Use properties to control everything from giving all the residential buildings the same build cost to making all annotations blue. Properties add data about the objects that can be leveraged in analytics.

Usages
1 minute
Collect, organize, and assign assumptions to geometry with Usages. For example, your 'residential' usage may set a floor to floor height, a net rent and a construction cost. This data then drives analytics, that allow you to understand how the city will work.
Urban
1 minute
Understand if your project is performing with instant data read-outs from the Urban Tab. The Urban Tab shows a quick analysis of the geometry on the map, based on inputs from Usages and Properties.
Analytics

Analytics runs off geometric properties of map features you created whilst , like area, width and length, height, and volume; combined with additional metadata from the and where you identified certain global assumptions for your project. In many ways, analytics mimics the spreadsheet software you are used to. The information is in a database of columns, rows, and cells.

Contextual Data

Layers + Lenses

  • Giraffe connects to tens of thousands of public layers.
  • The create layer menu also lets you upload your own shapefiles or geojson data to Giraffe. You can also geolocate images or pdfs.
  • Every vector layer in Giraffe can be dynamically styled + filtered using a Lens. Click the Lens icon next to the layer name to open the Lens.
Geospatial Data
1 minute
Giraffe is a GeoJSON editor.
Working with Layers
1 minute
Giraffe connects to tens of thousands of public layers. To add a layer to your project open the layer library and start searching. If you find some public data you can add it to your library with the wizard in the create layer menu.
Interrogating Layers with Lens

1 minute
Every vector layer in Giraffe can be dynamically styled + filtered using a Lens. Style, Filter, and interrogate vector data like you would in any GIS platform.

Extending Knowledge with Apps

1 minute
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Enterprise Management

Portfolio + Workspaces

  • Open the admin menu and set your workspace properties. These properties will be added to every project your team creates - they can be dates, toggles, files or more.
  • Add or remove users from your workspace.
  • Set template projects to accelerate onboarding and your teams work.
A Place for your work
1 minute
A workspace is a shared repository for your organisation's projects. Control your project portfolio with configurable properties.
Your portfolio, mapped
1 minute
Navigate your portfolio of projects on the map from scratchpad or inside any project. See all of your projects in context, with quick access to edit project information or open the project.
Your projects, managed

1 minute
Use an agile software standard, the Kanban board, to take your development pipeline to the next level.

Sharing and Governance

1 minute
Ensure the right people have the right information at the right time. Take control of your account governance. Manage the users in your account, what they can do, and what data they have access to.

Templates
1 minute
Systematise institutional knowledge through templates. Include default layers, Usages, Properties, Calculations, and more!
Generative Design

Generative Design

  • Let algorithms do the boring stuff so you can focus on what’s important.
  • Giraffe allows you to draw, automate parts of your design, analyze your design outcomes and accelerate your processes.
  • Take advantage of pre-designed algorithms, or use the Flow Builder to build anything!
Generative Design
1 minute
Generative design is an incremental method that involves algorithms that generate a set of outcomes to meet established criteria and a designer who fine-tunes the solution by picking the best outputs or tweaking input values, ranges, and variations. Smart Geometry is Giraffe’s solution for Generative Design. We know designers, developers, and real estate pros are smart, creative, and savvy. We don’t want computers to replace your expertise; rather, Smart Geometry augments your human capacity and enables faster, more accurate, and more varied results.
Flow Features
1 minute
Access some pre-baked algorithms right from the drawing bar! Just click the lightning bolt. Instantly create apartments, carparks, subdivisions, and more!
Transforms

1 minute
Add transforms that change the shape of the element you have selected. The original element becomes a reference for the transform to edit and adjust.

Flow Builder

1 minute
If you'd like to go deeper you can create add multiple transforms to a flow. These flows can be saved and reused. Create generative algorithms without writing a single line of code. The flow builder in Giraffe uses dendrogram assumptions to create an intuitive interface to create complex algorithms. Transforms branch from the initiating geometry. And branch again. One shape becomes many. And the designer can visually track the inputs and outputs in an intuitive node-based editor.

John Ross

CEO
“Giraffe has been an incredible tool that has helped us be efficient and scale our business. We are able to quickly layout a building and determine if a deal is of interest. What used to take days of back and forth with the architect/engineer now takes less than an hour. So, we are more efficient and can look for and evaluate more deals. We also use Giraffe to “communicate” our project vision to the seller, our banker, city officials, etc. We use and “show off” Giraffe in as many meetings as possible as inevitably everyone likes to “see” the opportunity. Giraffe is one of the most important “tools” we use on a day in and day out basis.”

Start creating better cities

Giraffe is free to use for property developers, architects and governments. To access our full set of capabilities, integrate apps and add additional seats learn more about our paid plans.
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