
Ask HN: Visualization with a pen suitable for technical content? - Tomte
Hello HN!<p>I&#x27;ve participated in a beginner&#x27;s workshop on &quot;visualization with a pen&quot; and, since I didn&#x27;t have a better example to use, I tried a topic that I had already visualized before, and with which I&#x27;m not really happy: the structure of the Linux kernel&#x27;s random number generation (for my &quot;Myths about &#x2F;dev&#x2F;urandom&quot; article):<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.2uo.de&#x2F;myths-about-urandom&#x2F;structure-new.png<p>My &quot;work&quot; looked like this:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.2uo.de&#x2F;myths-about-urandom&#x2F;visualization.jpg<p>Obviously, the two visualizations are not equivalent in technical content.<p>A remark:<p>* My time ran out badly, so there isn&#x27;t everything in it that I had planned to include. I won&#x27;t tell what more was supposed to go in, because that&#x27;s how it is now and I&#x27;d like to get feedback on this version, not some imaginary &quot;perfect&quot; version.<p>All kinds of feedback are welcome!
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detaro
The hand-drawn variant certainly is nicer than the first diagram!

In general I like the hand-drawn style for explanations, but it's easy to go
overboard with details. Making sure labels are easy to find for the eye and
read is important. In your example, some of the labels (e.g. on the left pot
and on the arrow across) are a bit small and hard to read in comparison. But
that's easy to fix with iteration on it.

