Microsoft Office is depressing me and I'm sick of putting rubbish diagrams in my papers! I want some swanky high-res colour diagrams like the ones in New Scientist etc. Anyone know of what program they use or anything else that'll do the trick?

cheers,
Mac

I always find going out with someone who's really into technology helps. Unfortunately I havent managed to acquire a suitable IT knowledgeable boyfriend during my PhD so all my diagrams are dodgey Word ones

mc2006, what sort of diagrams are you after? I use Adobe InDesign to make my diagrams and I really recommend that if you like designing your own.

Yes - tells us a bit more.

Thanks for replies so far. I was vaguely thinking of InDesign after I saw a demo from Adobe's Senior Evangelist (now there's a job title!)

Nothing complicated or technical required...Just graphs and tables, and a few simple diagrams illustrating hierarchies etc. Nothing scientific required...my topic is more about information management. I'm just sad and read NS in my spare time

Anyone used MS Visio?

I find curves really difficult - you just can't draw a good curve in word! And 3D stuff's not great, I'd like to be able to do 3-D rotating objects...

dia

thanks, I'll check dia out, though it looks similar to visio which I think we have a campus licence for.

Anyone have any experience in Adobe Illustrator or similar?

I do all my graphs in matlab, they look miles better than in pooey excel.

illustrator is nice if you have it.

DJWikid - nice plan, but the problem with having a computer nerd boyfriend/girlfriend is that you have a computer nerd boyfriend/girlfriend

As for pen + paper, with my skill that would look worse than Word!

Err are you trying to fake your data- or just planing to make it look less dodgy??? The more complicated a graph is, the more scientific it is- so don't forget to add some nice interactive arrows, plentiful colour (especially RED), pictures of your lab mates and pet, make the type face of the figure ledgens as small as possible.

Oh, and Don't forget to include the Bedford logo at the top.

anonGerman - I'm not a scientist, I have no data to fake just a few things that I want to make look professional, as opposed to bodged together in Office By graph I mean something purely illustrative - you know, like in management textbooks...2x2 matrix with a few blobs of colour in each quadrant, a few big fat arrows and maybe even a few words.

Will check out the fine offerings from Adobe methinks...

A little aside/warning - I used screen capture to put some lovely results in a report once rather than plotting them in excel (the equipment came with software for displaying results on screen). The results looked so good that my interviewer thought they were faked!! (had to ask, 'are these actual results?')

Think velocity is also good,dnt use it personally tho so if its rubbish dont blame me!