As a grad student, I have to give a lot of presentations, and all those presentations have to look good. Inevitably this means that I have to make a lot of pictures. This is a short little post about how I make “explanatory” figures: diagrams and models and such.

I prefer to make my own figures, since I’m always disappointed to see AI-generated stock photos. To be honest, I’d rather they just tell me what prompt they gave to the model, rather than the output. In some presentations I might also borrow figures from others’ work (with attribution, of course), but most of the time, I just make my own. For this article, I’ll walk through the creation process for one figure. The details aren’t super important, but in this case it’s a search tree, a la Monte Carlo Tree Search.

Sketches

Hand-sketched figures, before and after touching them up.

My figures usually start life as sketches done in pen in a notebook. If I can find one, I’ll use graph paper to make things line up nicely on a grid. Usually, I don’t have it, so I just draw it on ordinary college-ruled stuff.

I then take a picture of the sketch with my phone, and fiddle with my phone’s built-in color adjustment until it’s all just black and white. Sometimes this is the end state of my figure, since I often don’t need perfectly gorgeous slides, and I quite like the scrappy look of the doodles.

The diagram after tracing.

If I want something just a little bit sharper than the scanned drawing, but still a little scrappy, I’ll throw the scanned drawing into Inkscape and have it trace the figure. This gives cleaner lines and yields scalable figures, but sometimes it smudges things up.

Nicer figures

The diagrams, prepared in Typst (left) and Inkscape (right).

If I have to produce something official-looking, I usually have two approaches: making the document in Inkscape or generating it in Typst. This part is usually pretty easy, but it’s a little boring, since most of the creative part is done. I often end up doing a lot of yak shaving instead of making the final versions of these figures.

Both tools are flawed in their own special ways. Although Typst (in this instance, using Fletcher) is much more ergonomic than TikZ, it’s still text-based figure generation and suffers from all the same hackiness. Meanwhile, Inkscape is clunky, and it’s hard to get good, consistent-looking drawings even when using a grid.