alt Hacker NewsI love diagramming, but I genuinely don't understand how people can use these wonky looking tools. It looks off, I had to make my own[1] to create something that's easy to use and looks good/normal.
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Excalidraw has a 1 click 'sloppiness' change. We do drafts and ideation in 'full sloppy' mode, to indicate to the reader that this is not fully thought through, or a final documented decision. Once we've gotten through discussions and analysis, the final diagram is changed to be 'not sloppy', and the font changed from handwriting to a san serif font.
It's pretty effective to immediately communicate to folks that 'this is a concept' approach. Too many people instantly jump to conclusions about diagrams - if it's written down it must be done / fixed / formal.
In Excalidraw, you can reduce (and completely remove) the "sloppiness" in the element properties.
This looks really clean, nice work. I’ve had the same issues with most diagramming tools, it's either not so good looking or the insane pricing .
I went a different route using diagram-as-code with Mermaid instead of manual drawing.
“USING AI TO GENERATE DIAGRAMS
Click the AI button in the toolbar to copy the Grafly format reference. Paste it into any LLM (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini…) along with a description of the diagram you want. Copy the JSON the LLM returns. Click the Import JSON button () in the toolbar and paste it in. ”
Super user friendly as well! I don’t even understand the instructions on how to use it.
The best way to drive adoption to your product is to not shit on someone else's labour of love. Just a little pro-tip.
Whimsical is a whiteboard/diagram app that I think looks pretty nice, not too far from how yours looks
Questions:
1. Will you be making the source code public?
2. How to export the JSON for SCM, then re-import for updating/maintenance?
> It looks off
Depends on what you want to achieve with your look. Do you want to scream professionalism, authority, and completed? Use a regular UML tool.
Want to say this is a rough draft of a few ideas? Then using UML is probably THE wrong look. And Exaclidraw should be used instead.
--- Anecdote time. According to one of my professors, they showed how the prototype will look in action, and the customers were so impressed by the smoke and mirrors prototype they wanted to start using it right away.
In the end, customer walked away because they thought they were being strung along to pay for something that was already done.
When a background shape is in focus it comes to the foreground covering the shapes that are on top of it.
I absolutely love it that you can import mermaid. I love mermaid because I'm a huge fan of anything related to code that can I check into git, track its evolution and the thinking that went behind it.
However, those who don't know mermaid have to struggle with updating my diagrams. Your approach, atleast in theory, should get us the best of both worlds. Mermaid for those who would like to and the mouse for those who don't.
This also addresses the issue that large complex diagrams can get unwieldy using Mermaid and moving things around with a mouse would fix those edge cases.
I prefer excalidraw …
looks awesome man !
I like the wonky, hand-drawn looking style. I think it fits well beause usually if I use a diagram it's not 100% precise and accurate, but more a high-level illustration. The wonky style conveys the approximate precision of the presented concept.
Also, and that's personal, I think it's cute.