Software design is a process of problem solving and planning for a software solution. After the purpose and specifications of software are determined, software developers will design or employ designers to develop a plan for a solution. It includes low-level component and algorithm implementation issues as well as the architectural view.
The software requirements analysis (SRA) step of a software development process yields specifications that are used in software engineering. If the software is "semiautomated" or user centered, software design may involve user experience design yielding a story board to help determine those specifications. If the software is completely automated (meaning no user or user interface), a software design may be as simple as a flow chart or text describing a planned sequence of events. There are also semi-standard methods like Unified Modeling Language and Fundamental modeling concepts. In either case some documentation of the plan is usually the product of the design.
A software design may be platform-independent or platform-specific, depending on the availability of the technology called for by the design.
Software design can be considered as putting solution to the problem(s) in hand using the available capabilities. Hence the main difference between Software analysis and design is that the output of the analysis of a software problem will be smaller problems to solve and it should not deviate so much even if it is conducted by different team members or even by entirely different groups. But since design depends on the capabilities, we can have different designs for the same problem depending on the capabilities of the environment that will host the solution (whether it is some OS, web , mobile or even the new cloud computing paradigm). The solution will depend also on the used development environment (Whether you build a solution from scratch or using reliable frameworks or at least implement some suitable design patterns)
