As a UI designer, I need to create dashboards with graphs that look real. I often don’t have access to real data for my designs so I tend head over to Illustrator, grab the pen tool and whip together an area line chart. It usually looks like this pile of poop:

Who made this collection of witch hats?

I want to show you how you can use Google sheets, Adobe Illustrator and Sketch to make a graph like this:

Wow, this looks like real data.

To make this, you will:

1. Create some fake data in Google Sheets

2. Use that data to create an area line graph in Illustrator

3. Style the graph shape into what you see above in Sketch

1. Create some fake Data in Google Sheets

To make random numbers, head over to spreadsheets in google drive and type this function into an empty cell:

=RAND()*100

That will give you numbers like 83.20. My colleague, Kirill Popov, helped show me this function while we were designing email metrics visualizations. To make more, just click that cell and drag down until you have enough random numbers for your graph data points:

use =RAND()*100 to create your random numbers

2. Use that data to create an area line graph in Illustrator

Now that you have a nice list of random numbers, let’s open Illustrator and create an artboard that measures 1200 x 600 pixels:

Next, grab the area graph tool:

Drag it out for about 90% of the artboard size and you will be given a window to insert data. Copy your data from the spreadsheet you created earlier and paste it in illustrator and click the check mark to see the result.