Sketch, Adobe illustrator, InDesign for custom designs. Monodraw, for simple diagrams that are text based.
+1 for Monodraw. To me limitations just make me focus on what's important. Use it all the time.
Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
161–170 of 218 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#162You mention comic-like - for charts (as opposed to diagrams), XKCD has been a source of inspiration for a more casual style.
Here's one example: http://xkcdgraphs.com/ (there are plenty of others if you search for them).
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#163Well, the moving graphic on that page starts off as an SVG file here:
https://github.com/git-lfs/git-lfs.github.com/blob/master/im...
And the gif metadata says it was created using:
Adobe Photoshop CC 2014 (Macintosh)
So I guess that's how they did it. Personally I mostly use Gliffy for speed, but SVG is ideal and a bit of animation can go a long way.
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#164Old School rules: easy flow diagrams with GNU PIC: http://floppsie.comp.glam.ac.uk/Glamorgan/gaius/web/pic.html
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#165I personally feel that most of my use cases are covered by ASCII Flow ( http://asciiflow.com/ ) or MermaidJS ( https://mermaidjs.github.io/mermaid-live-editor/ ). For everything else that cannot be covered by these two I break out my pen and paper and click a picture.
Same. I love to draw with a pencil and paper. It's also much quicker. I snap a photo, and then finish it off in GIMP (crop, increase the contrast, add an alpha layer and use the fuzzy select / magic wand to delete most of the white background).
Ends up looking like this: https://erdo.github.io/android-fore/03-reactive-uis.html#qui...
Easy to make minor changes, but probably not great for complex sequence diagrams of course (or collaborating on a diagram with someone else - but that's better done just on paper anyway IMHO).
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#166Not like the example you've given, but for well designed and easy to configure diagrams that can be saved or exported in plain text (e.g. for use in documentation, websites or markdown) I use Monodraw: https://monodraw.helftone.com
For graphical diagrams I use yEd or occasionally draw.io for quick and simple graphical flow charts (online or offline as a gross javascript web frame - but it works well enough and it's free).
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#167I use yEd for nicely organized diagrams (state diagrams, data flow, process models), Dia for information-rich structured diagrams (UML or network schemas), graphwiz for autogenerated diagrams and Inkscape to make final touches to any of those.
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#168Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#169I still love using MetaPost.
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#170http://plantuml.com I've been doing a lot of flow diagrams and PlantUML has been invaluable. I specifically like it because sharing the flow means sharing some text, which itself is vaguely human-readable. There's an online renderer (bottom of the page in the above link), which means simple diagrams are also quick to create and view. It's got a few different modes that it understands but I'd definitely add it to the…
PlantUML looks great, all the features I need, but their page is infested with fake ads, including fake download buttons of 5 different kinds. They also link to download page on SourceForge (hmmm, it's still alive) with even worse ads. Maybe it just me, but I immediately lost any desire to try it.