Designing a document with marginal callouts
February 11, 2022 6:35 AM Subscribe
A common type of explainer document presents some object of analysis, either text or an image, in a central pane; then there are explanatory callout notes with pointers all around the outside margin, a little like the classic frog anatomy pic. This can be done by hand with individual callout graphics, but it's ugly. Are there canned document templates (Word? Canva? Piktochart?) that come preformatted with this particular design?
Bonus points for templates whose callout section allows for more robust annotations than the single-word anatomy type: for instance, it would be great to have callouts whose format allows a bolded heading + word-wrapped paragraph of explanatory text.
Likewise design that makes plenty of space for the notes and keeps them magically out of each other's way and out of the way of the central image.
I see these things all the freaking time, so they must be out there. Where?
Bonus points for templates whose callout section allows for more robust annotations than the single-word anatomy type: for instance, it would be great to have callouts whose format allows a bolded heading + word-wrapped paragraph of explanatory text.
Likewise design that makes plenty of space for the notes and keeps them magically out of each other's way and out of the way of the central image.
I see these things all the freaking time, so they must be out there. Where?
I’ve always used SnagIt for that. It’s gotten fancier (and a bit more expensive) over the years, but it’s awesome for instructional stuff.
posted by dbmcd at 1:31 PM on February 11, 2022
posted by dbmcd at 1:31 PM on February 11, 2022
I use Lucid Chart quite a bit for making flowcharts and it has become my go to tool for any type of task where I need to add text to an image, especially if I need to point a text box to a specific part of that image (often screenshots of a web app with arrows pointing to fields that I’m asking developers to change the behavior of), since I can drag and resize the text boxes and the lines will automatically move and follow (while also allowing me to adjust their position manually if I need to).
It’s got a ton of different templates and icons for a number of different tasks (network diagrams, circuit diagrams, org charts, etc). Last year I needed to make a simple floor plan of my office and after trying a bunch of different programs discovered there was a whole set of floor plan objects already in Lucid Chart.
The free version limits the number of documents you can edit (3 I think) and the number of objects in each (twentysomething, iirc). You can definitely make the text boxes as big as you want, I recently used it to cut and paste a bunch of chunks from various laws for a project where I needed to quickly access and draw connections between them, it worked great.
posted by Jawn at 6:39 PM on February 11, 2022
It’s got a ton of different templates and icons for a number of different tasks (network diagrams, circuit diagrams, org charts, etc). Last year I needed to make a simple floor plan of my office and after trying a bunch of different programs discovered there was a whole set of floor plan objects already in Lucid Chart.
The free version limits the number of documents you can edit (3 I think) and the number of objects in each (twentysomething, iirc). You can definitely make the text boxes as big as you want, I recently used it to cut and paste a bunch of chunks from various laws for a project where I needed to quickly access and draw connections between them, it worked great.
posted by Jawn at 6:39 PM on February 11, 2022
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posted by iamkimiam at 9:01 AM on February 11, 2022