Yes, really! Mermaids are helping me a lot.
Do you like design? Maybe or maybe not, but I'd like to transfer complex ideas maybe a diagram would be very easy to explain. Or no need to explain, but you want to capture in some physical forms so we don't forget it. This happens to me a lot after taking a walk or washing some dishes...
Solutions are coming to you in surprised ways, as long as you started to feel about the problems, maybe...
I have you Drawio diagrams for quite sometimes. There were about 300 diagrams created in the last three years, stored in Google Drive, so I can share to others very quickly.
But it takes time to have a complex diagram in Drawio. I already have for my own a very nice template, some kind of watermarking for my creativities, which have reduced about 10% of the drawing time. One another downside of the Drawio is it does not support the auto arrangement well when there are about 50-60 blocks and arrows.
When ChatGPT and LLMs appears, I had a question, how do they help me to reduce the drawing time? And the Mermaid diagrams have appeared, a code to diagram platform. And yes, LLMs can generate code extremely effectively. Now I can ask or type to LLMs to convert my ideas to diagrams super quickly. Of course, this post was created by voicing and typing.
The next question is, how can I manage a lot of my generated Mermaid diagrams? Why? Because I might like to go through my "studio" to see some diagrams that I created like six or nine months ago. Those may contain a $M or $B business idea.
Maybe, you have already used Mermaid a lot, in Markdown files or https://mermaid.live. Previews many Markdown files at the same time seem to be not available yet because of my limited Google/LLMs researches on this... For mermaid.live, tt requires subscription to have more than five diagrams...
OK, here is the last highlight of this long post. Notion has been bringing to us a platform where we can organize the presentation the way we like using modern display components. Yes, without any payment I can have infinite number of Mermaid diagrams displayed all in the preview mode for my design studio...
Significant time are now saved by Mermaids (LLMs, Notion,...) from Drawio, yes!
But let's see... Technologia is changing too fast...
And thanks ChatGPT for these related nice quotes:
- "Above all else show the data." - Edward Tufte, from his book "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" (2001)
- "Good design is clear thinking made visible, bad design is stupidity made visible.", also from Edward Tufte - https://www.azquotes.com/quote/816951
PS, I can share my simple Notion template or Drawio template if you like to try.