Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?

You can subscribe to a free account. The ‘signup free’ link is somewhat hidden under the pricing sections. The product has many nice drawing tools and templates and you can export to raster or vector formats.

You can make something like the one in your link by combining some preset icons Cacoo offers with regular drawing tools.

*Disclaimer: I’m a Cacoo developer

1. PowerPoint for composition. Unless whatever graphic you're making is simple enough to be produced by just 1 program, it's good to have a canvas-like program that you can assemble the components in. For me, that's usually PowerPoint, since it can be pretty free-form. PowerPoint slides can be embedded into Word documents as active content.

2. Equations: Word's equation editor or TeX. Other Microsoft Office products like PowerPoint and Excel have an equation editor built into them too, but those equation editors tend to be inferior to Word's. I used to copy/paste Word-equations into PowerPoint. Mathematica's an option if you're using it anyway, though it can look kinda clunky.

3. Graphs (excluding labels): Excel or a ray-tracer. For simple graphs, you can usually do them in Excel -- just have to learn the customization options (which I think folks often overlook, getting discouraged by the non-customized versions). For more complex graphs, sometimes it's just easiest to write your own ray-tracing scene. Matlab can be decent for some 3D surface figures, once you edit out its labels and replace them with better ones.

4. Labels: Word's equation editor or TeX again. While graph-creating tools can often insert labels just fine, they tend to be a bit rudimentary. So, once you make a graph, put it into PowerPoint, then insert your own axis labels and other markup by copying them from equation-editor tools. If you want to add arrows, circle something, or anything like that, then you can use PowerPoint's shapes.

5. Simple flow diagrams: Microsoft Visio or PowerPoint, depending on the kind. PowerPoint's probably better for the simplest things, but Visio scales better for larger diagrams.

6. Engineering designs: Whatever CAD you made them in. For example, I used to put chemical process schematics together in AspenTech's Aspen Plus, then copy/paste them into PowerPoint for further markup.

7. Minor tweaking: Paint, Paint.NET, etc.. If you just want to tweak a graphic or something before pasting it into PowerPoint, simple image-editing tools can let you do that.

8. Security: Write your own script. If you have some graphic that might have hidden tracking information embedded in slight pixel alterations, then you can do stuff like:

a. round pixel RGB values to the nearest 5 (or whatever);

b. merge pixels together (like Paint would if you shrink an image);

c. save as JPEG or some other lossful format;

d. randomly (using a CRNG) mutate pixel values by slight amounts to inject invisible noise.

9. Complex diagrams: Ray-tracing. Honestly I love ray-tracing stuff; it feels like a brute-force solution to just about anything you could want to draw, and if you like programming, I think it's one of those projects that you really ought to do at some point just as a matter of being well-versed in computers.

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Overall, my big tip would be to be aware of the various tools that can do parts of the overall job well, then compose them in a general canvas-like setting like PowerPoint, and then finalize any little tweaks using an image-editor.

It's free open-source software, works on Windows, Mac and Linux. It gives great balance for drawing on grids (reduces arbitrary decisions) and usability (power to draw what you want). I've gotten several compliments at talks for diagrams made using this software, so I highly recommend it.

+ Describe your drawing in code

+ Mostly intuitive syntax

+ Not very steep learning curve

- No visual editing: edit-compile-view cycle

- Time consuming