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Creating vector graphs

by Design SyncJune 23, 2015

Learn how to create vector graphs

I was pass on a design job from one of my client, one of the element requirement me to replicate a simple pie chart. Not too difficult and I could simply draw it out on a vector software like Illustrator or Corel Draw. However with a number of different version from the design brief this would have made the task tedious and slow. I was in my research mode in search for a quick and easy way to generate pie charts and came across a few techniques.

FF Chartwell Font:
If you create info-graphics you’ll probably know this already. FF Chartwell Font is a nifty quick way to generate graphs and charts from a serious of number inputs. The video is very self explanatory. To buy a single font it cost $29 (AUD) or for the family set $149 (AUD). The family set includes Lines, Eadar, Rings, Bars, Bars Vertical, Pies and Rose which can be purchase from FontFont.com. Not bad if you are consistently making graphs.

Web base graph creation:
I found a few sites which generate graphs. Some were pretty good and easy to set up and some not so great. One of the recommend one is Meta-Chart or Kids Zone Create A Graph and it’s free to use. You input your figures into the field and then generate a chart. Download the pdf and change the colour according to your requirements. What I did notice is when I came removing the line weight from the individual segments I notice there were gaps in-between. Each segments weren’t butting together. It’s definitely fine if you were to have the lines in place or have the chart small but my chart had to be a reasonable size about 6cm by 6cm and it is quite noticeable at this scale. I could manually fix with a few tricks or take it in Photoshop and clean it up but I chose to look for another quicker solution.

Generating in Illustrator:
Of all the digging around I came to realise Illustrator had a graph tool which could generate pie charts or bar graph, silly me. As you can see from this tutorial by Mike Wirth on Infographic Design 101: Intro to the graph tool in Adobe Illustrator. As you can see it really isn’t that complex to make your own vector graphics. I still do get a gap in-between the segments but it’s not as bad as the one created from the web application. What I eventually did was draw another circle, colour match the segment chart, position accurately with the pie chart and send it to the back. This covers the gap and you can now import it into Indesign or desktop publishing application you need.