Wednesday, March 17, 2010

On the Art of Network Diagrams and Presentation

March 4, 2009 by Greg Ferro · 20 Comments 

Using Coloured Pencils

So you may remem­ber the pre­vi­ous art­icle Diagrams and Colour Pencils and how it can be used to make a fast field dia­gram that is use­ful to the people around the meet­ing table. Now I want to take this dia­gram and put into a format that I can include in my doc­u­ment­a­tion and then put for­ward for approval.

The Value of Presentation

I like to take some time to make a dia­gram “look good”. Lets not get too car­ried away here and make like we are in the mar­ket­ing depart­ment (actu­ally, it’s not too dif­fi­cult to make a dia­gram look bet­ter than a lot of marketing.

ColourPencilsSample.jpg

Step 1 — the basic diagram

So lets draw up the basic struc­ture of the net­work design, so that we can see the shape of the net­work and get some feel for the lay­out of the sys­tem. In this draw­ing I will just use a single ser­vice line to start with:

art-diagramming-1.jpg

Not so bad, but still looks.… bor­ing

Step 2 — a little shadow

A little bit of drop shadow bring the ele­ments of the page to life.

art-diagramming-2.jpg

Step 3 — A back­ground, a little gradu­ated shad­ing — Looks Three Dimensional

Many net­work dia­grams look and feel two dimen­sional. When I look at the mar­ket­ing bro­chures, they use a three-​​D feel to make them look dif­fer­ent from “nor­mal” net­work dia­grams. Becuase they look ‘dif­fer­ent’ that are often impressive.

So lets insert a rect­angle, dis­tort it slightly from the square so it looks a little bit 3-​​D. Add a little shad­ing that starts dark at the bot­tom, then light­ens towards the top to give it a feel of“moving away from you”.

art-diagramming-3.jpg

Highlight Functionality

This is bet­ter, but I want to bring out the high­lights about the lay­ers of func­tion­al­ity here.

Pop some boxes across the tapered shape, then change their col­ours to some­thing that suits your taste, and give them some trans­par­ency. The trans­par­ency will allow the shape under­neath to be clearly seen and not lose the defin­i­tion or mean­ing of the 3D shape.

art-diagramming-4.jpg

I like this and things are going well but there are too many lay­ers here. The pic­ture looks a bit busy and means that it is los­ing focus. A bit more thought needed.

Remove some lay­ers, and fill in the blanks

So I removed a couple of the lay­ers, since I am focus­sing on the net­work­ing side (and nobody really cares about serv­ers any­more), and changed the font to some­thing a little bit nicer. I also touched up the col­ours to a bet­ter col­our scheme. The pre­vi­ous col­ours were a bit dodgy.

art-diagramming-5.jpg

Wrapup

So this is how I do /​ approach dia­grams when I am con­sult­ing, writ­ing white papers or internal doc­u­ment­a­tion. I think a little time spent think­ing about the lay­out is worth­while. I would love the hear about how you do dia­grams, or send me your dia­grams for post­ing if you have some­thing you would like to show off. I need more ideas on how to make dia­grams work better.

A word of warn­ing: muck­ing around with Visio or Omnigraffle can be a massive time waster. Don’t let it be an SSA.

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Comments

20 Responses to “On the Art of Network Diagrams and Presentation”
  1. Calin says:

    wow…my net­work dia­grams never looked like this :)
    nev­er­the­less I would prefer con­fig­ur­ing 10 devices that doing a dia­gram in Visio;

    good job!

  2. akonkol says:

    What tool did you use to draw the example dia­grams? Is that omnigraffle?

    • Greg Ferro says:

      For this post, I used OmniGraffle, but you can do the same things in Visio.

      • Brett Dixon says:

        Visio is much more pain­ful than Omnigraffle in my exper­i­ence. It may be because I have some very basic exper­i­ence with Adobe Illustrator and sim­ilar, but try­ing to use Visio can be very frus­trat­ing as it tries to be help­ful in some very annoy­ing ways sometimes.

        • Greg Ferro says:

          I try not to to blame my tools or soft­ware. It’s not help­ful in the long run. At least Visio is stable and con­sist­ent with other MS Office pro­grams. Over the years I have got­ten used to it.

          OmniGraffle on the Mac is really much bet­ter and easier to use, that is for sure, but even V5.1 doesn’t have per­fect import /​ export although its much bet­ter than V4. Maybe they are work­ing on the Visio com­pat­ib­il­ity some more.

  3. Oyvind says:

    Looks pretty, but does it do the job? There is not much inform­a­tion about the net­work, devices, address­ing, etc. How do you solve read­ab­il­ity when you add IP addresses, devi­ce­names, link info, speeds, and other stuff.

    I use lay­ers in Visio a lot, to be able to turn on and off the needed inform­a­tion, typ­ic­ally one layer with port num­ber­ing, one with inter­face and sub­net IP’s, one with device nam­ing, and so on. Using lay­ers this way I can have one draw­ing with all the info in once place. I also use one layer 1, one layer 2, and mul­tiple layer 3 logical “views” of the net­work as dif­fer­ent draw­ings with dif­fer­ent lay­ers, to cover all dimensions.

    Doing this takes a lot of time, but it’s worth it for the cus­tomer and con­sult­ants as it makes troubleshoot­ing and canges a lot easier and less risky.

    • Greg Ferro says:

      I men­tion that this is mostly for pre­s­ales /​ design /​ present­a­tion, which I think implies not so much ‘hands on’. That sort of dia­gram needs to be some­what dif­fer­ent and has a lot of other information.

      Maybe another post look­ing at tech­nical doc­u­ment­a­tion then.

  4. Ian says:

    Good stuff!

  5. drkfiber says:

    I would love to see a post on tech­nical doc­u­ment­a­tion. Through years of prac­tice I am get­ting bet­ter at it, but it is always nice to com­pare to oth­ers and gain fresh ideas.

  6. Bret says:

    >Don’t let it be an SSA.

    What does SSA stand for?

  7. Vinf_net says:

    Good post :)

    Do you know how do you dis­tort the rect­angle in Visio?… I can’t fig­ure it out?

  8. lxh says:

    can you write another post about how to do this use Visio?? so i can fol­low your guide by my vision…

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