Edit: Version 0.2 now available. It has optimizations, as well as a better user interface and can be aborted mid-designation (That was a design oversight >_>).

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Dwarf Fortress, for all of its amazing qualities, has a very cumbersome UI. And as anyone who has ever tried making a fortress more complex than a square with some tables in it, you know that designating large and elaborate fortress is an incredibly time-consuming and frustrating task.
There are two ways around this frustration:
1) Use the mouse. While it does give more control, the mouse is very finicky.
2) Use macros and use a template. This is easier, but you still have to designate the fortress in the first place to record your macro.
Neither of the solutions are ideal, because they both require you to exert at least some small amount of effort. I've decided that this is simply unacceptable.

Enter Dwarf Fortress Architect, a small and very simple yet extremely powerful Java application I've written that designates your fortress for you while you sit there and watch.

It loads a bitmap image that you or someone else creates in their favorite graphics editing program and extracts color information from the pixels. It then parses that information into commands for the program to execute -- commands that just so happen to correlate with keyboard shortcuts in Dwarf Fortress. Do you see where I'm going with this?

See the forum thread for more details: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=64723.0