OmniGraffle Review | Creative Brainstorming Tools | Whiteboard Creative Tools

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I thought I would start this Category off with one of my favorite creative tools.

OmniGraffle is a fabulous tool for a copywriter or a creative director or pretty much anybody who needs to use – or wants to use – diagrams to develop and share their ideas.

It is usually one of the first tools I use – in fact it was part of the development of this website.

I use it for (among other things)

Creative brainstorming
Concept mind maps
Flow and process charts
Wireframing a website
Laying out a home theater system

Clients respond favorably – it’s like a gussied up whiteboard – and you can incorporate logos, fonts, colors – whatever to make it just so.

While you can do diagrams with other apps, the look is much sleeker then what you can achieve in PowerPoint, and the app is much easier to run (for me) then Illustrator since you don’t have to manage layers.

One of the things that makes Omnigraffle really valuable is a system of templates and specialized stencils. The stencils are vector graphics which can be inserted onto the page and then modified: depending on the art you can change line weights, fill them, scale them, nest them and set type inside them.

I put this together in a few minutes using art from a variety of stencils to give you an idea of what’s there.

Most of the stencils have been developed and contributed by users. Omnigraffle maintains a site called Graffletopia just for the stencils. You install them in the Application Support Folder. Ezee Pzee.

Omnigraffle exports in a variety of formats including EPS, PDF, html, PNG and JPEG so you can easily incorporate your diagrams into other applications.

I have been using it since V1.0 - great support and a stable product.

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/OmniGraffle/

What do you use for this kind of problem solving and communication?

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