Smart graphics for visual people
UserFocus has released a cool set of user experience shapes for Visio users that are involved with user experience activities or produce user experience deliverables.
This free Visio stencil contains 34 master shapes that will help you to illustrate your research plan and show the types of deliverables you will produce.
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 places each character in a circle.
The cup graphics look something like the thumbnail you see at the beginning of this article. In fact, I used the newly-created SmartShape to make that a-r-a-n that you see in the square.
[Read more…] about Run Circles Around Your Text With the Circle-text Title SmartShape
They’re back!
The terrible towels will wave in Dallas on February 6th.
Oh well. Kudos to Green Bay!
Do you ever have the need to highlight just a portion of a diagram?
Perhaps you want to discuss a certain part of the graphic, and just want to see specific details without being distracted by the rest of the diagram?
In a recent thread in the Visio Guy Forums, folks were talking about how to clip or mask a circular region of a Visio drawing.
The resulting discussion–and mini shape-design contest that spontaneously erupted–resulted in today’s article, complete with a free SmartShape for you to download!
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 modern-looking servers. As I considered all the subtle, yet elegant, ways in which I could hint, guide, steer—teach the man to fish—I finally caved-in and whipped up a hexagonal Visio custom fill pattern that you can download (for free) right here! [Read more…] about Hexagonal Custom Fill Pattern
A few ideas have been burning (another) hole in my head, and I just had to get them out.
I’ve wanted to build shapes that look hand-drawn for quite some time. Using random formulas in the ShapeSheet, each shape could have slight variations that make them look natural.
I’ve also wanted to make a set of shapes for creating simple graphs and charts. Not that this hasn’t been done before, but I wanted some simple shapes for illustrative purposes.
A few recent posts and articles finally drove me to it. I hope you find the results useful, interesting, and most importantly, amusing!
[Read more…] about ‘Indexed’ Shapes – for that Hand-drawn Look
Well Visio Fans, June is upon us, the weather is hot, and the UEFA European Cup 2008 is about to start!
Europe is going soccer crazy, and signs of Fußball-mania are everywhere! As I walk around Vienna, it’s pretty hard not to notice these 
waving from store-fronts and car windows.
Of course Visio Guy wanted to get in on the football action, so we’ve drummed up some rabble-rousing, chest-pounding Visio shapes to fan the flames of nationalistic fervor!
[Read more…] about European Cup 2008 Country-Flag Visio 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 too foreboding…
…UNTIL NOW!
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 unless I have totally missed something (which does occur occasionally), there is one feature that Visio could really use: the ability to resize shapes on-center.
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 overdrawn Visio diagrams.
[Read more…] about Lens Flare & Highlight Shapes – Bling Bling!