Building your venue floor plan

Getting around the canvas

• Pan: drag any empty part of the floor — or any locked table or fixture (see Locking the layout below).
• Zoom: scroll the wheel, pinch on a trackpad, or use the +, −, and fit-to-view buttons in the bottom-right. A pinch zooms the room only, not the whole browser page.
• Grid & snap: the floor shows a grid. Set the snap size — 0.5, 1, 2, or 5 ft — in the Room settings; tables and fixtures snap to it as you drag.
• Room size: set Width and Depth in feet (5–500) in the Room settings panel.

Five ways to build

There’s no single right path — combine these however suits you. While a room is still empty, the canvas shows a How would you like to start? card with the three starting points side by side: Sketch it with AI, Start from a template, or Build it yourself. Close it with the × if you’d rather explore on your own — it stays closed for that event.

The left panel mirrors that split. The tinted Start with a layout card at the top holds the AI and template options (once the room has something in it, it folds up into Replace the layout). Below it, Build it yourself holds the hand tools — room size, Add table, Add element, and Zones — which you’ll also use to refine whatever the AI or a template gave you.

Moving, resizing & arranging

• Move: drag a table or fixture. It snaps to the grid.
• Select: click an item to open its properties on the right. Click empty floor or press Esc to deselect.
• Resize a fixture: select it, then drag any of its four corner handles. (Tables are resized by editing their dimensions in the properties panel.)
• Rotate: use the Rotate 90° button in the properties panel.
• Precise placement: type exact X / Y (and size) values in the properties panel.
• Rename: the properties panel has separate # and Theme fields. The chart shows 7 · Eras Tour when both are filled, just Table 7 with only a number, or just the theme name with no number.
• Delete: select and press Delete or Backspace, or use the Delete button in the properties panel. Deleting a table also clears its seats from every arrangement.

Chair shape & gap

Two settings in Room settings → Seats control how chairs render and how far they sit from the table — they shape the room’s visual footprint so you can plan capacity realistically.

• Chair shape: Round or Square. Match your venue’s chair stock. Applies to every seat on the chart (and is reflected in printed name labels too).
• Chair gap: a 0–9″ slider for the distance between the table edge and the chair edge. The default of 3″ matches a comfortably tucked-in chair; drop it lower if you want a tighter footprint when fitting tables into a small room.

Locking the layout

Once the room looks right, lock it. Nothing locked can be moved by accident — and dragging across a locked table or fixture pans the room instead, so you can zoom in close and move around freely while you seat guests.

• Lock everything at once: click Lock layout in the bottom-right toolbar, next to the zoom controls. It locks every table and every fixture — dance floor, stage, bar and the rest — and reads Layout locked while it’s on. Click it again to unlock everything.
• Lock one item: select a table or fixture, then use the Locked / Unlocked button in its properties panel. Locked tables show a small padlock on the chart.
• A plain click still selects a locked item, so you can reach its settings or unlock it. Arrow keys won’t nudge it, and a locked fixture hides its resize handles.
• Seating is unaffected: you can still drag guests onto and between the seats of a locked table.

How seats are placed

Seats are generated automatically from a table’s shape and counts — you don’t place them by hand. Round tables space seats evenly around the edge; rectangular tables distribute them along the sides you specified.

Option A — Upload a floor plan

Best when the venue gave you a real plan (or you can take a phone photo of one). Claude reads the image and extracts room size, tables, and fixtures.

• PDF — sent to Claude in full quality; the first page is also rasterized for the on-canvas reference.
• PNG / JPG — downscaled and re-encoded as JPEG (~1500 px on the long side) for both Claude and the reference layer.
• Size limit: 15 MB. Plans don’t need to be professional — a phone photo of a venue’s printout works.
• Extra context (optional): the upload dialog has a textarea for “Anything not visible in the plan?” — use it for day-of fixtures (bar, dance floor), columns / fire exits the plan omits, or to correct something you can see is wrong. When present, the button becomes Parse with AI + notes and Claude merges them.

Option B — Describe the room

Best when you have no plan but you know roughly what you want. Click Describe the room… under Sketch it with AI to open a textarea-only dialog (no file picker). Be as specific as you can — dimensions, table mix, fixture positions — and click Generate room. Example:

Text-only generations don’t produce a reference image — the canvas is the only source of truth. You can always edit anything afterward, including switching to the upload flow on a future revision.

The shared flow

1. 1On the empty-room card or in the Room tab’s left panel, pick Upload a floor plan… or Describe the room…
2. 2Provide the input — a file, a description, or both — then click Parse with AI / Generate room.
3. 3Review the result — room size, table list, fixture list, and any worth double-checking notes the model surfaced.
4. 4Click Apply to the room to replace the current tables, fixtures, and zones (you’ll be asked to confirm if the room isn’t empty). Your guest list and arrangements stay — any seats tied to tables that no longer exist are cleared.

The reference image layer (upload only)

When a file backs the parse, the original sits behind the editable layout at 40% opacity. You control it from two places:

• A small image icon joins the zoom controls in the bottom-right of the canvas — click to hide or show the reference.
• The Room left panel grows a Reference image section with a visibility toggle, an opacity slider, and a Remove button.

Creating a zone

1. 1In the Zones section of the left panel, type a name and click Add. It gets an auto-assigned color.
2. 2Click the colored dot beside a zone to recolor it, edit its name inline, or use the trash icon to remove it.

Assigning tables to a zone

Tables join a zone from the table’s side, not the zone’s:

1. 1Click a table on the canvas to select it.
2. 2In its properties panel (right side), pick a zone from the Zone dropdown. Choose No zone to remove it.

Zones & the AI

Here’s the powerful part: when a zone’s name matches a guest tag’s name and the “Respect zones” rule is on, the AI seats guests with that tag at tables inside that zone. For example, name a zone “Family” and tag the relevant guests “Family”, and the AI will keep them in that corner of the room.