open source gis - How to generate schemas of GIS hardware / software / workflows?

Quite often I find myself in a situation where I need to explain hardware or software GIS infrastructure to people with no or limited knowledge of GIS. Or give an overview of geoprocessing tasks involved in an analysis.

In such cases picture can be trully worth thousand words. Doing last minute preparations I usually relied on quick and dirty PowerPoint slide with random assortment of free icons and images from around the web but I would be more happy to invest little bit more time into something that will look better.

I'm thinking about schemas resembling for instance images like this:

Or this:

What kind of software (preferably free) would be best suited to create such images?

Is there any place where you could get (preferably for free) 'GIS-specific' icons used in such diagrams?

Answer

I'd have to guess that the bottom one was done in some form of Microsoft Visio - which of course is not free. Here are some of those shapes from Visio 2010 that I just found on my install, and they look very similar to the graphic you show:

I have used InkScape for making all sorts of technical diagrams, posters, and flyers. It's completely FOSS, and if you have any experience with Adobe Illustrator, the learning curve isn't too bad. I often will Google for images I want to place into my diagram or there are tons of sites out there with SVG graphics you can use.

Another option, which I haven't tried, could be OpenOffice Draw. It is also FOSS and appears to have connectors like Visio and you can import common graphics formats.

As far as graphics you can find, Smashing Magazine has awesome posts on free icons sets that are out there (search the site for "icons" for more). I have found some real gems there, such as nice globes, computers, etc. Some of the icon sets even provide the vector formats of the icons, which is nice. These icons work great in pieces like what you are wanting to create.

I guess what I'm getting at is that, with a little creativity and Googling, you can easily make professional-looking diagrams with open-source drawing programs.