Overview & Introduction
Welcome to the practical heart of the course.
While Part I gave you the theoretical foundations, the language structure, and the conceptual landscape of ArchiMate, Part II is where you actually start building — where you move your mouse, create your first elements, draw your first relationships, and begin to feel what real ArchiMate modeling is like.
This part has one very clear goal:
Make you feel confident and productive in Visual Paradigm when working with ArchiMate — as fast as possible.
We assume that
- You may be opening Visual Paradigm for the very first time,
- Or you may have used the tool before but never seriously for ArchiMate.
Either way — by the end of Part II you should be able to:
- Create a clean, professional ArchiMate project from scratch
- Understand and use the most important modeling habits & tricks that experienced architects use every day
- Produce good-looking, well-structured diagrams that are easy to read and easy to maintain
- Use the small but very powerful set of techniques that give 80–90% of the daily modeling quality
What we will cover in Part II
Chapter 3 – Getting Started with Visual Paradigm Very practical first steps:
- Desktop vs Online – which one should you really use?
- Installation / account creation / licensing quick path
- Creating your first ArchiMate 3.2 project the right way
- Understanding the certified ArchiMate tool palette & basic workspace layout
Chapter 4 – Core Modeling Techniques This is the most important practical chapter of the whole course for many people.
We focus on the things that make the biggest difference in everyday modeling quality:
- Smart drag-and-drop + quick element creation patterns
- When, why and how to use nesting (very powerful in ArchiMate!)
- How to use color meaningfully (layers, status, custom conventions…)
- The most important notational habits that make diagrams instantly more professional
- Very practical tricks for clean alignment, sizing, routing & layout
- Correct way of importing / exporting models (especially the official ArchiMate Model Exchange format)
Why this part is extremely important (even if you already know some modeling tools)
Many people can draw boxes and arrows… Very few people can quickly and consistently produce clean, correct, compact, and communicative ArchiMate diagrams that stakeholders actually understand and architects actually want to maintain.
The difference almost always lies in small, repeatable habits that most training courses skip or mention only very briefly.
Part II is all about those habits.
After finishing these two chapters, you will have the solid practical foundation that lets you:
- really benefit from the AI features in Part III
- understand and meaningfully use the different viewpoints in Part IV
- start modeling real business cases with confidence
Let’s get our hands dirty — right now.
Turn on Visual Paradigm… and let’s build beautiful ArchiMate models together.
