Drawing
The free-form canvas
Draw architecture diagrams and flowcharts by hand: 13 shapes, snapping, connectors that route themselves, rubber-band select and a sketch look.
Adding shapes
Double-click anywhere on empty canvas to drop a shape there, or pick one from the palette at the bottom left. There are thirteen:
- Rectangle, rounded rectangle and stadium — systems, services, steps.
- Diamond — a decision in a flowchart.
- Cylinder — a database or any store.
- Hexagon and parallelogram — gateways, queues, input and output.
- Circle — start and end points.
- Note — an annotation hanging off the diagram.
- Actor — a person or an external consumer.
- Cloud — the internet, or a provider boundary.
- Group — a labelled container you draw behind things, for a VPC, a subnet or a swimlane.
- Text — a bare label with no box around it.
Double-click a shape to edit its text. Drag a corner handle to resize it. Select it and press ⌘/Ctrl + D to duplicate it.
Connecting things
Hover a shape and four blue dots appear on its edges. Drag from one to another shape and you have a connector. The useful trick is what happens when you let go over empty space: a new shape is created there, already connected, which lets you build a whole chain without going back to the palette.
Connectors route themselves. A connector remembers which sides you attached it to, and picks the tidiest sides automatically when you did not say. Three routings are available from the properties panel:
| Routing | What it looks like | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Orthogonal | Right-angled elbows | Architecture and network diagrams — the default |
| Straight | A direct line | Short hops where an elbow is noise |
| Curved | A gentle arc | Dense diagrams where lines would otherwise overlap |
Each connector can carry a label, an arrowhead at either end or both, its own colour, and a solid, dashed or dotted line. Labels are knocked out of the line behind them so they stay readable.
Selecting and arranging
Drag on empty canvas to rubber-band select everything inside the box. Shift-click to add to or remove from the selection, and ⌘/Ctrl + A to take everything. A multiple selection drags, duplicates and deletes as one thing.
Shapes snap to each other's edges and centres as you drag, with guides showing what they lined up against. Hold Alt while dragging to ignore snapping and place something exactly where you want it. Arrow keys nudge the selection a pixel at a time, and Shift with an arrow key moves it in bigger steps.
Quick draw
For building something fast, quick draw takes a rough gesture and turns it into a shape — sketch a box, a diamond or an ellipse and it is recognised and cleaned up. It is the fastest way to get an idea out on a tablet or with a stylus, where reaching for a palette breaks the flow.
Frequently asked
- Can I stop shapes snapping to each other?
- Hold Alt while dragging. Snapping stays on for everything else.
- How do I draw a VPC or swimlane boundary?
- Use the group shape. Draw it around the things it contains and they move with it; give it a label and it reads as a boundary.
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