The frenzied launch of Apple’s sadly-named iPad really highlights how big touch-based user interfaces are these days. If you are a UX designer or are working out user interfaces, then you’ll need to include touch …

Web designers and AI folks need to know what colors they are using. And they need to know precisely.
Bright red, Fuchsia  and Mauve just won’t do. They need exacting names like: #FF0000, #FF00FF and #E0B0FF.
Since …

In this Visio Tutorial, you’ll learn how to use drawing tools to create a 3D effect of an arrow poking through a 3D plane!

Learn two methods for creating sophisticated fill patterns for your Visio shapes!

A rainbow spectrum can really liven-up a diagram and clarify a point that you are trying to make.
Whether you are trying to illustrate a broad band of choices or options, talking about a range of …

We want word clouds too! Here’s a first step towards getting them in Visio.

Get a cool, free Visio stencil full of people, office and document shapes for illustrating your ux research plan and process.

The other day, I visited one of my favorite coffee houses in Munich: Aran. While sipping my mocha, the logo on the cup gave me the idea for a Visio SmartShape:
A title shape that automatically …

Download a Visio SmartShape that allows you to mask/clip your drawings and diagrams. You can temporarily highlight just a particular portion of the drawing without being distracted by the rest of the details.

A recent Visio Guy forum post asked about a creating a hexagonal grids. The poster wanted to create some new Visio network shapes that show-off the groovy new hexagonal ventilation grids that you see on …

Create charts and graphs that have a hand-drawn look using this interesting set of Visio SmartShapes!

We’ve created sixteen Visio shapes that combine individual country-outlines with corresponding national flags. Whether you are sprucing up an Euro Cup 2008 related diagram, or creating other geographically related diagrams, be sure and get these shapes!

For quite some time now, I’ve wanted to create a Visio SmartShape of a proper, oval, comic-style Word Balloon shape.
But calculating the intersection of a triangular callout with the perimeter of an ellipse was …

Visio has tons of keyboard shortcuts, including modifiers for constraining the resizing and moving of shapes. For instance, with the Shift key depressed, you can constrain a shape to move only vertically or horizontally. Neat-o!
But …

Welcome to this month’s issue of Pimp My Visio Shapes! (*cough*)
I’ve come up with some shapes that will allow you to add lighting effects such as lens flares, star-highlights, and other shininess-enhancing effects to your …

Learn how to create see-through, shiny glass effects using basic, end-user features of Visio!

Learn how to apply four colors to a single shape, make use of advanced gradient and transparency techniques, and download a shape that does it all!

Follow links to two excellent articles about creating your own Visio Custom Line Patterns, as well as download some fun patterns created just for you!

Getting text on a circle in Visio was always a pain until the Circular Text Generator (version 1) appeared on Visio Guy. V1 was evidently a big hit, but you wanted more! Version 2 adds …

Learn how to create interesting visual effects while uncovering the capabilities of Visio’s ShapeSheet and the Smart Shapes it enables you to create. This article shows you how to create a wintry scene with Smart Trees that fade into the distance as you reduce their size.

Finally, you can add text to a circle inside of Visio! This is first version of a series of tools to help you get your Visio text out-of-line!