I found, by accident I think, Visio’s ‘hand-drawn’ template - and everything changed. Suddenly my nit-picky perfectionist mind could get past the fact that these diagrams, which I was in the process of drafting, weren’t perfect. The edges didn’t align, the connecting lines weren’t all on exactly the same horizontal, the boxes weren’t all exactly the same width.
I’m not kidding, I finished it within an hour. When it was done, I switched back to ‘square boxes and round circles’ mode, lined everything up, and was done.
It was a revelation.
Try Alfred Wainwright's guides - he not only hand-illustrated but hand-wrote and hand-justified his books.
well, fwiw, the randomness/uniqueness of the elements help to give them their hand-drawn feel, and the font on this link does not contain that randomness. All letters look the same everywhere. And the line height is constant and so are the vertical positions. It’s more like a stylized font than handwriting. And it’s actually quite a game / readable stylized font. It’s not as fast as the more mechanical / typewritten fonts that are prevalent, but it’s still an comfortable read.
Anyways maybe it’s the same reason we tend to prefer a human voice giving us directions over a robot voice