Visio Guy 
Free Visio People Shapes
Posted by Visio Guy on May 20th, 2007 13888 views
Do you need people shapes to spruce up those Org-charts, workflow diagrams, or marketing slides? Are you tired of Visio's outdated or distracting-and-overly-3D shapes? Then you've come to the right place!
Today Visio Guy offers its own version of the The Human Form. A subtly shaded, Fisher-Price-looking, person-pawn for your downloading pleasure. And of course, they have a few extra smart features just to sweeten the deal...
Good People are Hard to Find
At first, I thought I might produce a matrix of all people-related-shapes by stencil. Then I thought that I ought to publish this article sometime this decade. So I resorted to Visio's Shape Search utility.
I entered a variety of people-related terms in my quest for people-shapes. Below is a sampling of the shapes that I found with each term. The search terms return overlapping shape sets, so I'll just show the unique shapes for simplicity's sake.
I found it interesting that I couldn't enter multiple search terms in the Shapes window. Although I tried various combinations of list separators: spaces, colons, semi-colons, I was only able to get results using single words, or rarely, with two words, separated by a space.
These are the results for the U.S. English version of Visio 2003 Professional:
A search for User resulted in these shapes:
Entering Person found a few more:
Curiously, the extremely cool shape below came from searching for: Human, but the master was named Person! Why in the heck didn't this one show up when I searched for Person before!?!?
I squeezed out two more Master Shapes using the terms: Man or Men or Woman or Women. I'll by-pass the golden opportunity for toilet-humor here:
What I Didn't Like
Okay, there's plenty of people shapes out there already. So what's my problem you ask? Well, I've a few nitpicks. They're not exactly global warming, but we get a nicely-formatted bullet list that adds text and makes this look like a serious post:
- Some of them are rather Windows-95-looking, in my opinion.
- Some of the newer 3-D looking shapes are bitmaps, so you can't really mess with the formatting.
- Too much 3D.
I sometimes find 3D distracting in a diagrams. Icons or symbols are supposed to be simplified to enhance clarity. Do you want a photo of some dude on the men's room? In my opinion, if you use good-looking, front-on shapes, a diagram can still look cool, but retain an elegant simplicity that makes it clearer. - There are some suprises when formatting the shapes.
If you select any of the Visio-shapes and apply a red fill, you'll see that the results are often less than spectacular. I must point out that the newer 3D shapes handle the color changes with, er...flying colors.
If you apply shadows to the same shapes, they get even dodgier, with the exception of the newer 3D shapes:
Interestingly, it looks like there's perhaps a time-line of improvements. We can see that Whale Boy (the last shape on the right) handles shadows just fine, but doesn't do so well with fill. Two of the other 3D shapes take fill and shadow just fine.
By the way, does anyone know the story of Whale Boy? I've heard on more than one occasion that the internal Microsoft name for the MSN Messenger pawn-person was Whale Boy, but I've never heard the story behind the name.
Whale Boy
Visio Guys
Enter the Visio Guy Person shape...TADA! You'll see that it handles color- and shadow-formatting with aplumb:
I've also created some hat-master shapes that snap and glue onto the person shapes and transform your Visio Guy people shapes into Village People shapes:
I hope you find the Visio Guy People Shapes useful and entertaining to use!
Download: People Shapes (2007).zip (105 KB)
Download: People Shapes (2002).zip (101 KB)
May 24th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
So will he turn to the left (or right), so he can be orthagonal like the other people in the 2007 workflow stencil?
Also, like the other Workflow shapes, will he support the userdefined cell USER.skincolor?
John… Visio MVP
May 24th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
Hi John,
No User.skincolor, since he’s all one color. Face and clothes are the same. He’s a symbol. And since he faces forward, he’s horizontally symmetric…plus then I’d have to draw a side view of each hat!
The idea was to share a shape that people might find useful or interesting and that is easy to use.
- Chris
July 15th, 2007 at 11:38 am
Thanks - just what I was looking for. [thumbs up]
August 9th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
Nice shapes! Just thought I would pass along a tip … you can change Whale Boy’s color (the blue part) by right clicking the shape and selecting “Format” then “Style”. In the Style dialog box, select the bottom drop-down (”Fill Style”) and select “People”. Next right-click Whale Boy again and select “Format” then “Fill”. You can now change Whale Boy’s color, fill pattern and/or transparency. You can also select “Format” and “Line” to change Whale Boy’s outline too.
August 11th, 2007 at 12:36 am
Thanks Robotom3000!
Good tip - you can just edit the “People” style to change the formatting of Whale Boy. This offers much better control than just trying to change the fill color — which can give weird results.
However, for those that try this, that will change the color for every Whale Boy on the page, because it is a change to the style that is applied to every Whale Boy shape. It’s not a solution for individual formatting.
- Chris
October 9th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
great shapes, I’ve used them a few times.
November 10th, 2007 at 11:35 am
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April 15th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
I like the look of these. — Any chance the template file could be saved as an older version of visio? (Like 2002?
)
thanks
jk
April 15th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Hi Jeff,
I just added a 2002 version to get you going.
For others, the ‘2007′ version works with Visio 2003 as well.
- Chris
May 12th, 2008 at 7:02 am
Great shapes, just what i needed
May 29th, 2008 at 8:48 am
[…] download also contains an improved version of the Person shape, which first debuted in: Free Visio People Shapes. The new Person behaves better with Visio 2007’s Theme-ing […]
June 6th, 2008 at 8:07 am
[…] from the view-counter and download stats for our post: Free Visio People Shapes, people just love free people […]
June 26th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
It appears that Microsoft uses the key words ‘head’ or ‘persons’ for their icons of individuals. The singular keyword ‘person’ doesn’t get many hits in Office applications.