I read a good blog post today by Jeffrey Engel about his tools used for information design.
Certainly, as he describes to express what one wants one should use the tool best suited to the task. To that end I would only add that many simply are unaware of how expressive Visio can be. To help fill that gap, I recreated portion of his chart in Visio 2010.
Here is the original:
And my version using Visio 2010 (Click to see a larger version)
Some of the Visio magic is not apparent – the 3D box shapes have darker sides as you can see. However, the darker sides colors are *automatically* determined by the color of the front side. So formatting all those 3D boxes was a trivial exercise. Having done this once now, I imagine one could recreate the drawing less than 10 minutes.
I don’t believe that there is one tool that will meet everyone’s needs when designing things like this and certainly Visio has its limitations. And it also has great strengths. If you have access to it, try your hand at using it for information design – I think you’ll discover it has a lot to offer.