Duarte’s Diagrammer®: Thousands of Free Diagrams at Your Fingertips

When it comes to conveying complex information or processes, few things work better than a simple diagram. Drawing a quick sketch is an effective way to get creativity bubbling around a workflow, design problem, or product feature. But where back-of-the-napkin brainstorming can be liberating, creating diagrams from scratch in PowerPoint® can be daunting.  

Thankfully, where there is madness, Duarte finds a method. This is how twenty years of sketches and infographic concepts became Diagrammer®, a searchable taxonomy of over 4,000 PowerPoint®-ready diagrams. The product of countless ideation sessions and design challenges, this extensive resource is available as a free download to speed up your next project. 

The Road to Diagrammer® 

Over the years, Duarte designers have illustrated thousands of concepts to visualize information for client presentations. With a mind always seeking patterns and processes, Nancy had an inkling that an invaluable resource could be unearthed from the firm’s numerous sketchbooks. Taking a page from William Burroughs, Nancy went to work photocopying and cutting up pages to source a treasure trove of images. From there, Nancy arranged and grouped the images into similar categories, gaining momentum with each connection that emerged.  

Like a dogged detective cracking a cold case, Nancy’s a-ha moment came when the pieces were finally arranged. This became the taxonomy of diagrams featured in Chapter 3 of her first book, Slide:ology, and it remains one of the more popular sections. Just as these images refused to stay tucked away in notebooks, another life awaited them beyond the page. 

Thousands of Simple, Free Designs 

After the release of Slide:ology, readers were hungry for more. This appetite for guidance toward greater design efficiency inspired the development of Duarte’s Slide:ology training workshop. As part of the training curriculum, select diagrams from Slide:ology were digitized for attendees to use in their presentations. The response was monumental.  

What began as scattered drawings evolved into a digital archive of actionable diagrams. The message was clear: people needed tools to help visualize their information. From there, a team went to work rendering the thousands of sketches as PowerPoint®-ready diagrams. Lo and behold, Diagrammer® was born. 

Start Saving Time and Boosting Productivity with Free Diagrams 

Refined since its debut in Slide:ology, this taxonomy of simple designs has helped avoid headaches and improved countless presentations. Whether you’re looking for company-wide alignment, to articulate a complex process, or demonstrate product value, Diagrammer® has a quick, simple solution. 

Organized into five main categories—Flow, Network, Stack, Segment, and Join—each encompasses a different key relationship between information to articulate a wide-array of needs. And for more granular options, each category has two or more subsets to help further clarify your data. Rather than letting them gather dust around the office, these designs are ready to enhance your next project. 

Download Diagrammer® for a host of free diagrams to give your presentations, pitch decks, and Slidedocs® some Duarte magic. For a quick crash course in the archive’s many use-cases, dive into the video below. 

Duarte video: Diagram taxonomy

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Originally Published on March 14, 2012; Updated on June 20, 2025.