I 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.
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.
I agree 100% it's personal, wasn't trying to imply anything else, but for me the style takes away from the actual content and makes it harder to read/grasp.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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Super user friendly as well! I don’t even understand the instructions on how to use it.
In the upper right there is an import/export button that could be used for this. It's stored in localstorage so you could also dump that to wherever you like.
edit: added link to the repo in the about modal.
edit2: added import export of the entire localstorage entry on the bottom of the diagrams(left) panel.
Also, and that's personal, I think it's cute.