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Zoning diagrams, drawn over a real floor plan.

Kubun is a bubble-diagram tool for workplace strategy and space planning. Drop in a plan, set the scale, and place zones that behave like soap bubbles: resize one and its neighbours make room. Areas stay true, and the results export cleanly.

No account. Your plans are never uploaded.

 

Go on, drag a zone, or pull its corner dot.

To scale, always

Set the scale once from a dimension you know. Every zone reports its real width, depth, area and share of the floor, in metres or feet.

Ready for the client

Export SVG in real-world units for Illustrator or InDesign, PNG or JPG for quick sharing, and a zone schedule as CSV.

Stays on your machine

Kubun runs entirely in your browser. Your plans and projects are never uploaded anywhere.

From plan to schedule in six steps

Kubun opens with three sample zones, so you can try things straight away. To work on your own plan:

  1. Add your plan

    Open Plan & Scale (top left) and choose a PDF or an image. For a multi-page PDF, pick the sheet you want. Use the opacity slider to keep the plan quiet behind your zones.

  2. Set the scale

    Press Set scale, click two points on a dimension you know, say whether it runs across (X) or down (Y), and type the real length. That's the only number Kubun needs.

  3. Outline the floor

    Optional, but useful: press Set floor shape and click around the edge of the floor, closing the loop on your first point. Kubun then knows the true floor area for percentages, and keeps zones inside the boundary. Prefer a number? Type the total area instead.

  4. Place and size zones

    Press + Tap to place bubble, then click the plan. Drag a zone to move it and drag its corner to resize it, or type a width and depth, or a target percentage of the floor. Zones push each other apart as they grow. Lock a zone to make it an immovable obstacle. Edit shape turns a zone into an L, T or U (right angles only).

  5. Organise

    Give zones a category (a name and a colour, shared across every floor), a layer (per floor, handy for "existing" versus "proposed"), and groups. Shift-click several zones and press Group these; grouped zones move together.

  6. Export and save

    Open Export for SVG (in real-world units, with or without the plan underneath), PNG and JPG. Toggle the zone schedule for areas per zone, per category and per floor, and export it as CSV.

Save your work. Kubun doesn't autosave. Use Export project to download a project file, and Import project to pick up where you left off.

Worth knowing

  • Multiple floors. Use the + beside the floor tabs. Drag a tab to reorder it, double-click to rename. Categories are shared across floors; layers and groups belong to one floor.
  • Trace another floor. In Plan & Scale, Trace another floor shows a different floor's plan as a faint grey reference. Match view lines the two up.
  • Pan and zoom. The controls above the plan move and magnify the view without touching your zones. Set as default view remembers your framing.
  • Selecting. Shift-click to select several zones. ⌘/Ctrl + A selects all, ⌘/Ctrl + C and V copy and paste (including onto another floor), and Esc clears the selection.
  • Legend. The tag icon swaps zone names for short codes and shows a key you can drag anywhere on the plan.
  • Diagram style. The gear icon holds units, label font, corner roundness and line thickness.

区分

kubun · roughly “KOO-boon”

A Japanese word for dividing things up.

区分 means division or classification: sorting a whole into sections and categories. It is also the word for each of the parts you end up with.

ku ward, district, compartment: a bounded piece of something larger
bun a part, or to divide

That is most of what a zoning diagram does. You take a floor, decide what belongs where, and give every part a name and a colour. The word turns up in property too: 区分所有 (kubun shoyū) is how Japanese law describes owning one unit within a shared building.