diagramming-guidelineslisted

# Diagramming Guidelines **Figma FigJam is the house standard for diagrams. Prefer it over every other tool** — Mermaid, Excalidraw, ASCII, draw.io, PlantUML. The Figma MCP, plugin, and skills are strong and getting stronger; the artifact a reader gets should be a real, editable board, not a code block. ## Why FigJam first A FigJam board is collaborative, live, and durable: it can be opened, restyled, annotated, and extended by anyone, and it embeds cleanly as a high-resolution image. A Mermaid block in a doc is none of those — it is locked to one renderer, hard to lay out deliberately, and fights you the moment a diagram gets non-trivial. Use the tool that produces an asset the team keeps, not a snippet that rots. ## Workflow (Figma MCP) 1. **Load the prerequisite skill first.** `/figma-generate-diagram` is mandatory *before* any `generate_diagram` call; `/figma-create-new-file` before `create_new_file`; `/figma-use-figjam` (and `/figma-use`) before any `use_figma` call. Skipping them causes avoidable failures. 2. **Get a board.** Target an existing FigJam file, or create one (`/figma-create-new-file` → `create_new_file` with editorType `figjam`). 3. **Generate the diagram.** For flowcharts, architecture, sequence, ERD, and state diagrams use `generate_diagram`. It accepts Mermaid-style syntax as *input* and renders a FigJam board from it — so Mermaid may exist transiently as the generation input, but **the board is the published artifact, never a Mermaid code block in