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

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

#72

I use Whimsical. https://whimsical.co/ It makes it super simple to create good-looking diagrams, and it can do a lot more than just diagrams too.

I was hoping to find someone else mention Whimsical too. It's so fast to use. I've been recommending it to coworkers and its allowed them to be much more productive.

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

#73
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In one of the videos a guy tells something from a tool, where you can simply sketch with pen/paper and then make a picture and it's converted to a vector graphic? How cool is that :-)

Adobe Capture (mobile app) does that. There are also several others.

Yeah, somehow the Android version of my tablet is not supported. But I've installed a sketching app, pretty nice.

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

#74
post #20

Google Draw is awesome for this, you can search and add icons from the web, basic vectorized shapes, embeddable in other Google office products.

Google Drawings are convenient for their collaboration and ability to include in other Google docs, but I've mostly found that it seems optimized to produce ugly diagrams. It takes extra work to make things look lined up well.

I use it for the easy collaboration, but miss OmniGraffle every time I do.

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

#75

Very surprised to see no one mentioning yeD here. It is _the one_ diagram making tool I go to, when I make any diagrams related to software development. The only areas where I had issues with it, that I can remember were: - "How do I teach it to make these halfcircle-circle joints of component diagrams?" - Sequence diagrams are a bit slow to make with it, because yeD not knowing their semantics and not doing much for…

Thanks, first time I hear of it! Link: https://www.yworks.com/products/yed

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

#76

Very surprised to see no one mentioning yeD here. It is _the one_ diagram making tool I go to, when I make any diagrams related to software development. The only areas where I had issues with it, that I can remember were: - "How do I teach it to make these halfcircle-circle joints of component diagrams?" - Sequence diagrams are a bit slow to make with it, because yeD not knowing their semantics and not doing much for…

I use yED, for quite some time now

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

#77
This question seems to pop on HN every other month. I very much share the frustration- after trying every product under the sun I always end up coming back to Sketch, which is suboptimal to say the least. I tried to think what is it about Sketch (which isn't meant for diagraming) that makes it the best tool for the job, this is what i came up with: (1) it's native/fast (2) keyboard shortcuts (3) simple shapes / no "component overload" (4) pretty results. So for fun (and profit) I decided to write my own diagraming tool, with those points in mind. It's Mac only, very much work-in-progress and built specifically to replace Sketch in my workflow. If anyone's interested (in working on this, testing, whatever) - hit me up at my username here @ gmail.

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

#79

One that I haven't seen mentioned on this list is Plectica - great for explaining complex / in-depth concepts in a clean and easy to update / present / view fashion. Really robust forever-free option too. https://www.plectica.com

Very interesting idea. Basically like mind maps but you can have structured content (eg: lists) in the nodes?

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

#80

If you want to spend hours or days handcrafting and tuning, there are plenty of options, but for quickly making diagrams that still look good (and can be fine-tuned to look even better) I find Visio hard to beat. It's Windows only and costs money, but it is well worth the money.

Thanks for mentioning Visio, it is now available on the browser as well for basic, business, flowcharts, network, and cross-functional flowcharts. $5/per user/per month (annual plan) https://products.office.com/en-us/visio/visio-online-plan-1

Disclosure: I work for the Visio team, so if you have any feedback pls lmk.

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