When I got into mapping, I found Google's SketchUp an incredibly crafty tool for map design (Note: by that point I knew how to do a lot of things in Hammer and had already tried/failed at a few simple maps). It's a simple program that gives you a good opportunity to design and check for gameflow, sizes, etc. I believe in total, getting a final sketch took about a week and a half for me to design it, talk to a couple of people about where problems could arise, and correct them. The final result turned out like this:
If you want to play around with that files yourself, it's located here. So long as you don't base your work on that, I'm cool with you playing around with it.
