Creating stencils with cool graphics

You may have already noticed that some of the stencils contain some pretty cool graphics, or clip-arts. The happy piggy bank from the Cash Flow stencil is a very good example. In fact, the whole Cash Flow stencil is a collection of fancy clip-art made into a stencil.

Before you go ahead and collect lots of nice looking graphics from all kinds of sources there are two things you must have in mind:

• OmniGraffle is a vector-based diagramming application.

• The legal side of using other peoples' graphical works.

The vector side of things

Drawings in OmniGraffle are vector based. For all practical purposes, this means that a diagram you create should look equally good if you print it out on your laser printer or if you let a special print shop create a 20 x 20 feet banner of your diagram to hang on your wall.

You can of course use a JPG or a GIF, but if you try enlarging these kinds of pictures, you may quickly see that certain details do not look quite right.

When...