Dia Tips (was RFC: Component Diagram)

Máirín Duffy duffy at redhat.com
Wed Mar 14 21:57:07 UTC 2012


Hey Matt, 

Okay so there's a few tips to make your Dia output a bit purdier:

- Go to the 'View' menu and make sure 'anti-aliased' is checked on

- Make sure both ends of every connected arrow are red when you click on
them. If any are green, that means that end is not connected. Connecting
them lines them up right

- Use the font 'Overpass' to make things more 'Red Hat-ty' looking. You
can select all objects in one go, go to 'Objects' > 'Properties', select
'Overpass' from the fonts list and hit apply and update them all in one
go. If you need the Overpass font it's available at
http://design.lab.bos.redhat.com/inkscape

- Make sure arrows are parallel and perpendicular to where they need to
be. You can tap the boxes they're connected to with the arrow keys on
your keyboard to line them up properly.

- Try to make the most-important parts of the diagram larger to
emphasize them, less-important ones smaller. I don't know enough about
Aeolus to do this, but I assumed the conductor was pretty important so I
gave it a boost in size.

- Try to vary between object labels and path labels. I made the path
labels a medium grey and left the object labels black. I also made the
object labels in all caps to give them more emphasis. This establishes a
visual hierarchy of sorts so at a glance you can understand the
different weights of the info being presented. 

Anyway here's what I got, it's not breath-taking but I think it's clean
and easy-to-read:

http://design.lab.bos.redhat.com/mocks/Graphics/Aeolus%
20Diagrams/aeolus.png

~m




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