Wrapping 2024

For Rayon, 2024 has been a year for maturing into a self-standing professional software for interior architects and designers, across more than 120 countries.

Behind Rayon’s V2, and to build up to it, the team has been busy shipping constantly over the year. Among the many things that were crafted in 2024, we would like to take a step back and go through the main features, key upgrades and the bulk of tinier things that made this year a collective success.

Let’s rewind 2024…

Main features

At its core, 2024 has been about bringing to the 2023 version of Rayon some much-needed building blocks; out of the swarm of new additions, 4 main feature blocks have taken Rayon to an entirely new level.

New interface — We’ve redesigned the entire interface to make Rayon crisper, faster, more geared towards real experts. The new layout emphasizes ease of navigation, providing a streamlined experience and a quicker access to the essentials. Menus have gotten more compact, panels have been made denser, the general UX of the software has been rethought, etc.

Views and Canvases — The importance of outputting crisp document sets has been a core concern of 2024; conversely, Rayon now offers views and canvases, allowing users to organize their work into model and paper spaces, build layouts to the correct scale, etc. Crafting a beautiful, technical document set became increasingly feasible this year. As we get to 2025, Rayon is finally a software where state-of-the-art layouts can be built, much quicker than in legacy software offerings.

New renderer — We also overhauled the rendering engine of our software to ensure faster performance and smoother visuals. This means more responsive interactions, high-definition graphics, and the ability to handle much heavier models. We hope our users can now enjoy a snappier design experience.

Desktop app — 2024 was also about introducing our desktop application for users who prefer native experiences. The desktop app provides all the functionality of the web app with few added benefits. It's optimized for performance and ensures users stay productive, and enjoy deep work, away from the noise of their browser.

Key upgrades

From the 2023 app, we have also chosen to double-down on certain dimensions of Rayon. Although these changes constitute upgrades rather than entirely new additions, they together contribute to the general increase in depth and reliability of the editing experience in our software.

Libraries depth — Not only did our team significantly expand the amount of assets in our app (from hundreds of blocks, to thousands), it also diversified its repositories; blocks now ship in 3 different views, style libraries were added, as well as a 120+ library of templates.

More exhaustive annotation layer — Rayon's annotation layer has been strengthened this year: we introduced leaders, added new modes on dimensions, block heads can now be added in annotations, and annotation style became much richer.

Deeper command stack — Rayon's list of commands also increased. We introduced the Array command, the Boolean command, and added many new modes in existing commands.

More control over settings — Early 2024, Rayon suffered from a lack of control over important settings of the editor. The team worked this year to offer to our users more input over things like units, precision, formatting, dark mode, etc.

New command line — Though Rayon had shortcuts in place since last year, the abilty to call commands through a command line was missing. We added this features this year, allowing user to find the CAD experience they are used to.

Improved navigation — Users can now navigate using mouse and the typical CAD shortcuts, so as to get much closer to the usual CAD “gymnastic” expert drafters are used to.

Model history — Since Q3 of this year, users are able to retrieve past versions of their file.

The unspoken fixes

We would like now to pay a tribute to all the tiny thigns that the team shipped this year, and that made our users' life much (much) smoother. To only list some of them…

Wall distance editing.
In-app template section.
Insertion point of DWG import.
Openings orientation.
Simpler PDF export.
Command and mode memorization.
More keyboard-controlled features.
Double-click to edit.
Revamped paywall.
New hatches libraries.
New arc mode for walls.
New template categories.
Faster trim command.
Search bar in the layer panel.
Precise editing of hatches and textures.
Imperial fractional dimensions.
Arc mode for zone divider.
Better selection between overlapping objects.
Batch-edit annotations.
Better chamfer command.
Page previews in the page panel.
Multi-dimension.
Direction mode for dimensions (aligned, horizontal, vertical, rotated).
Arc mode on the arrow tool.
Better support for transparent background images
Custom units for surfaces
Better boolean command
More options for 'Select Similar'
New style panel
New canvas settings (active layer, canvas name, units).
New units panel.
Offset, trim, extend on walls.
Improved marquee select.
Color palettes in styles.
Smart search in style and block libraries.
Ability to move blocks inside leader.
Referral program for students.
New sweep mode for arc command.
New array command.
Ability to reorder canvases.
Library semantic search.
New shortcuts.

Much more small and big updates were done this year; we refer our readers to our documentation product update page to read more about it.

Towards 2025

We turn the page of a year when Rayon firmed up its V1 into a more mature, relevant and powerful second version; a definitive backbone that we now intend to build upon to become the best design tool for interior designers and architects.

And as we step into 2025, we wish to all our users (and to the ones that will join us this year) a happy new year!