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

Creating stencils with cool graphics


You may have already noticed that some of the stencils contain some pretty cool graphics, or clip-arts. The happy piggy bank from the Cash Flow stencil is a very good example. In fact, the whole Cash Flow stencil is a collection of fancy clip-art made into a stencil.

Before you go ahead and collect lots of nice looking graphics from all kinds of sources there are two things you must have in mind:

  • OmniGraffle is a vector-based diagramming application.

  • The legal side of using other peoples' graphical works.

The vector side of things

Drawings in OmniGraffle are vector based. For all practical purposes, this means that a diagram you create should look equally good if you print it out on your laser printer or if you let a special print shop create a 20 x 20 feet banner of your diagram to hang on your wall.

You can of course use a JPG or a GIF, but if you try enlarging these kinds of pictures, you may quickly see that certain details do not look quite right.

When...