Producing Good Graphics

The general wisdom is that a picture tells more than a thousand words. However, this is only true for well-prepared graphics. A sloppily prepared picture may not only be difficult to understand; it may mislead the viewer outright.

Unfortunately, producing good graphics is not easily explained in a few short sentences. For quantitative data there are, however, the wonderful books by Edward Tufte that explain much about producing good graphics, and how to place them on the page for maximum impact. Many of his insights are also applicable to other forms of diagrams, but to our knowlege, no such books exist specifically about producing good architecture diagrams and the like. We suspect, however, that typical examples could be improved.

Creating Diagrams

For preparing diagrams, we prefer OmniGraffle. The tool is better than the horrible examples on the web page suggest. OmniGraffle is installed on all our Macs (it doesn't run anywhere else). OmniGraffle has PDF export, so you can produce images that you can import into documents and presentations.

Creating Graphs

For preparing graphs of quantitative data, we prefer Gnuplot. This is a command-line tool that runs on almost all popular operating systems, including Windoes, Linux, and MacOS. Gnuplot has a steep learning curve, but once mastered can produce almost any kind of plot from raw data sets.