Almost every diagram is shapes joined by arrows. livediagram makes both fast: shapes come from the Palette, and arrows snap between shapes with quick-connect. This article covers the basics; for the full catalogue see Shapes and Arrows.
Adding shapes
The Palette, the strip across the top of the canvas, holds everything you can add. It starts with two dropdowns: the selection mode (Select, Hand, Eraser and the rest) and the category. It opens on Popular, the twelve tiles most people reach for: Square, Circle, Diamond, text, an arrow, a frame, a sticky note, an image, the shape pen, a table, a code block and an entity. See where each one lives for the full map.
Pick a tile from Popular, or open the category dropdown and choose Shapes: the strip shows its first tiles, and More (⋯) the full set: square, circle, diamond, cylinder, hexagon, stadium, and many more.
Click the canvas to drop the shape there at its natural size, or drag on the canvas to draw it at exactly the size you want. You can also drag the tile straight onto the canvas.
Double-click the shape to add a label, then type. Enter starts a new line, and a click elsewhere finishes the label. With a shape selected you can also just start typing, or press Space.
Common shapes have their own keys, too: R square, O circle, D diamond, C cylinder and G parallelogram (see Keyboard Shortcuts).
The category dropdown groups the rest into bands. In Diagram mode, Common holds Shapes, Write and Draw; Structure holds Build (frames, lanes, mind maps); Decorate holds Icons, Stickers, Tech (the full-colour cloud and infrastructure marks, see Technology icons) and Media; and Dynamic holds Collaborate. The wireframing kit (Components and Devices: browser, phone and laptop frames) and the Data charts live in Illustrate mode's palette.
Connecting with arrows
The fastest way to draw an arrow is quick-connect:
Drag a + onto another shape, or click it to fan out its options (Duplicate, Arrow, Pencil, Text) and drag Arrow onto another shape. livediagram draws an arrow pinned to both, so the arrow follows whenever you move either shape. On a phone, tap Arrow, then tap the target shape.
To draw a free connector instead, pick Add Arrow (in Popular, or the Draw category), or
press A, and drag between any two points.
Duplicate in the same options drops a connected copy of the shape beside it, the quickest way to grow a flow one step at a time. Turn on Quick-Add on Hover in Settings and the options open as soon as you hover a +. See Quick-Add on Hover.
Styling arrows
Right-click an arrow (long-press on touch) to open its formatting:
- Line: Straight, Curved or Angled (an L-shaped elbow); the pattern (Solid, Dashed, Dotted, Dash-dot, Long dash or Dash-dot-dot); and the thickness, Thin, Medium, Thick or Extra thick.
- Pointer: the arrowhead shape, size, and which ends carry a head.
- Label: double-click an arrow to type a label. It sits on the middle of the line, with the line broken open behind it, and wraps onto more lines when it is long. Press Shift+Enter for a line break of your own.
- Pass Behind Boxes: on by default, so a long arrow crossing an unrelated shape ducks under it instead of drawing a line over its label. Turn it off per arrow from the Line section if you want the old always-on-top look.
Drag an arrow's line to bend it where you grabbed it, and use the handles on curved and angled arrows to shape the path exactly. See Arrow Styles.
Working in a flow? Drop a shape, label it, quick-connect to the next spot, and repeat. Because a new shape can inherit the selected one's size, chained nodes stay tidy without fiddling.
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