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I'm also partial to the second one myself Miles. I had refrained from describing the difference so as not to skew the results, but the basic difference is that the first picture uses the thicker black lines to denote overlap of visible borders/boundaries, and the thin lines solely describe seams on the model. The second drawing on the other hand only uses the thick black lines to describe the projected shape of the model, while all other lines are described with thin lines. I took this second style from manga technique for drawing mechanical objects. The subdued lines and bold shape are supposed to give a more 3d feel, but I suppose that's up to perception. Would it make any difference to you if the black lines in the first weren't as thick as they are? Perhaps somewhere halfway between the thick and the thin lines.
I'm curious because when I made the instructions for my anvil model I didn't really think too hard about the diagrams, as I'd never really taken a look at any other model diagrams. I honestly just couldn't find one that had decent diagrams (found plenty of models, but few assembly instructions).
At first I believed that the grey shading was some sort of light play to make the diagrams look more 3d. Finally, I realized on some other diagrams that were more consistent, grey denoted the non-printed side of parts and white denoted the printed side. That was an epiphany moment right there.
So I'm trying to update my diagrams accordingly. I'm avoiding halftone dot effects and such, because while I think it looks better visually and saves ink, it doesn't work well outside of Adobe Reader (unless you convert the halftone into vectors but that increases the file size which annoys me).
So apart from a preference for either of these two drawings, if someone has some references for good instruction diagrams it'd be great to have some sort of foundation as opposed to just stumbling about blindly (as I'm doing).
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