Book Image

OmniGraffle 5 Diagramming Essentials

Book Image

OmniGraffle 5 Diagramming Essentials

Overview of this book

If a picture is worth a thousand words, why settle for anything less? Creating good visualizations to substantiate your ideas is essential in today's corporate environment. Use OmniGraffle's remarkably powerful and flexible features to get your diagrams right. Although fun to use, it can get cumbersome to find out exactly how to get what you want.This book will teach you how to make stunning diagrams without spending much time and energy. No matter if you have never used OmniGraffle, or if you are using it on a daily basis, this book will teach you how to get the most out of this splendid diagramming tool. It will first teach you the basics of the program and then extend your knowledge to a higher level.The book will teach you to make eye-popping visuals using a lot of useful, step-by-step examples. It begins with covering concepts that beef up your basics of using OmniGraffle. The earlier chapters will teach you to prepare dazzling diagrams from scratch with the many stencils, shapes, and fonts that are included in OmniGraffle. As your understanding of OmniGraffle broadens, the book will go even deeper to explain the less understood features of the software. It also covers some handy time-saving techniques such as workspaces and keyboard shortcuts.By the time you reach the end of this book, you will have mastered OmniGraffle to turn your ideas into diagrams.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
OmniGraffle 5 Diagramming Essentials
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
Preface
9
OmniGraffle workspaces
Index

Chapter 3. Shapes, Building Blocks for Diagrams

Shapes in OmniGraffle comes in many forms.

You have rectangles, circles, squashed rectangles, diamonds, hexagons, octagons, triangles, arrows, double arrows, wedges that looks like PacMan stars, houses, puzzle pieces, cylinders, clouds, speech bubbles, lightning bolts, patches, hearts, and so on. These shapes are called compound shapes.

The American Heritage ® Dictionary of the English language, fourth edition defines a compound to be a combination of two or more elements or parts. We are missing one type of shape, and that is the line. Line shapes are called singular shapes.

The second shape type missing is the text shape. We'll deal with this shape later in this chapter.

Shapes are the basic building blocks of diagrams. In the very first diagram you made in Chapter 1, Getting Started with OmniGraffle you used three different shapes: The rectangle in the form of an oblong, the diamond, and the line. You gave the shapes different characteristics...