Practicing TikZ with an Ecosocial Theory Diagram

Recently I've had something of an obsession with the TikZ figure rendering system that comes with $\LaTeX$. To better focus my learning and practice, I thought I'd work on recreating a relatively complicated figure that was originally done in PowerPoint.

While I think I'd make different stylistic or design choices, my thinking is that if I can replicate this figure's style, that's good practice towards being able to replicate other styles in general.

Overall, I'm quite happy with how this turned out, as I think the (exactly) 100 lines of .tex code I wrote are elegant considering how new I am with TikZ and they accomplish quite a lot!

The Original Figure

The TikZ Rendering

Lessons Learned Along The Way

These aren't really listed in any order, but these are some of the things I figured out as I went along:

Bigger lessons learned:

• It helped a lot to define reference coordinates by variables using syntax like \coordinate (LevelsBoxCenter) at (7.45, .1); and later write code like \filldraw [fill=mycyan, draw=black] ([shift=({-1.25,1.825})]LevelsBoxCenter) rectangle ([shift=({1.25,-1.825})]LevelsBoxCenter); (emphasis on the shift part) so I could move essentially what I'd call "grouped objects" together just by adjusting the definition of the LevelsBoxCenter variable.
• \begin{scope} ... \end{scope} is a super powerful pattern — for example I used it in two places: one to horizontally reflect the curvey arrow drawn (using [xscale=-1]) and another time to define a clip on an ellipse with text inside it so it doesn't go outside the boundary of the outer rectangular permiter box.
• \tikzset is also quite powerful: in this example, I used it to set all of the text used to sans-serif and bold.
• It still blows my mind that you can write \for loops in tikz. Moreover, the idea of using options like [remember=\y as \lasty (initially 1.8)] (like in the following bit) still feels a bit like magic.
  • \foreach \y/\ytext [remember=\y as \lasty (initially 1.8)] in {1.4/national, 1.0/regional, 0.6/area, 0.2/household, -0.2/individual}

Minor lessons learned:

• You can't use \\ to create a linebreak within a \node inside tikz unless the \node has an [align=left] (or middle or right) property set.
• Maybe this is obvious to others, but I found I couldn't break text across lines inside a \node if that text was inside a \Large or similar formatting block — instead, I had to do something like this: \node [...] at (...) {\Large{first line goes here}\\ \Large{second line goes here}} (e.g., make separate \Large calls for each line). Maybe there's a better way to do this?
• I went a long time thinking I was going to settle for the predefined colors, but importing the xcolor package and then defining my own colors was very easy once I pulled out the RGB colors (using this tool) using an eyedropper tool (any color eyedropper tool that lets you copy/paste hex codes works).

References

• Define coordinates as a variable https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/12862/298630
• Arrows https://tikz.dev/tikz-arrows
• Programmatically shifting variable coordinates https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/98924/transform-defined-coordinates-in-tikz
• Shading https://tikz.dev/library-shadings
• Color and color variables https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Colors
• Creating a thick arrow https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/215831/tikz-large-curved-arrow-filled-with-border
• Path decoarations https://tikz.dev/tikz-decorations
• Clipping https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/53184/tikz-clip-shapes-with-another-built-in-shape
• Drawing ellipses https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/65018/how-to-draw-an-ellipse