One of our Visio Guy readers recently sent us some very well-drawn shapes for Cisco IP Telephone buttons. Let’s all send a warm thank you very much to Art Braune for adding to the quality and usefulness of this site!

Art told me he would send me a blurb, describing how he uses the shapes, but I thought I’d take a guess. After quickly Google-ing for Cisco IP Telephone, but without reading too much, I surmised that this thing is highly customizable. So it would make sense that IT departments would want to document how they had modified the phone, then send out a quick-reference card (or booklet) to company employees.

So, like, how do I work this thing?

About the Shapes and Downloads

The shapes are easy to use, clearly drawn, and downright attractive. Have a look:

There are two versions of the shapes. One with white-backgrounds, the other with clear-backgrounds, so the color of the phone can show through, if you want.

Art also graciously included two other Visio files:

Cisco 79xx IP Telephone Wall Mount Template.vsd is drawn to-scale, so that you can print it out, accurately drill holes in your office wall, and hang that phone to free up valuable desk space!

Calibri Default Font.vst is a Visio template that has the Calibri font set as the default. Visio unfortunately has no notion of a “Default.dot” template, like Word does, where you can forever change your default styles. If you start a drawing using this template, you get the Calibri font from the get-go.

Download: Cisco IP Phone Buttons.zip (172 KB)

Now, Art’s shapes are well-built and precisely drawn, but we found a few items that we wanted to tweak. In the following articles, we analyze these shapes from a Shape Designer’s point of view, and see what modifications we can perform to make them even better.

So for you technically-minded readers out there, be sure and have a look at:

• Making Shapes More Efficient: Using Fewer Shapes & Groups
• Smart LineWeight: Bigger Shape, Thicker Lines