Creating a flowchart can be a immense way to bring some clarity to a decision-making process. Finding a free tool to generate flowcharts, however, isn’t always a simple task.

One solid option is MeeSoft’s Diagram Designer. It’s extremely easy to get started with select an element from the sidebar, drag it onto your workspace, and add some text. Repeat until you have got your whole process in order. That’s really all there is to it. Want to add some visual interest? Insert an image via the edit menu!

Elements can be effortlessly scaled and moved after placement, and the properties menu lets you change each item’s setting, border and font colors, as well as text alignment. Diagram Designer also supports several pages so you can save several charts inside one .DDD file. Your finished diagrams can be exported to several standard image formats including JPG, PNG, and GIF.

The number of blogs increases daily, and web design presently favors type-led plainness over intricate Flash-based interfaces outside of websites for videogames and movies, anyway.

However, online typeface relics a sore point with many designers, who are ever more irked by restrictions. We have been restricted to choosing font’s users already have installed or embedding custom type by using images.

However, Snook and others consider change is on the way. 2010 could see the web become a place where type shines, but only if essential technical hurdles are overcome and web designers are au fait with the fundamentals of typography.

Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and solicitous decision-making. Not least, it ties up junior officers referred to as PowerPoint Rangers in the daily training of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader’s pre-mission warfare meeting in a remote pocket of Afghanistan.

As an industry forecaster, I helped polish many, many slide decks. And I have created more than a few of my own. Some of the criticisms are certainly valid while others seem to me more about the nature of routine status meetings than the particular tool used to create material for those meetings.

It’s not that PowerPoint and its competitors don’t share any blame. Over time, they have gained features like gradient fills and shadow that support deception and the gratuitous use of graphical junk. Standard templates tend to the chaotic and garish. But the hierarchical bullets that are the target of many Power Point criticisms such as the following predates PowerPoint, indeed, predate personal computers.