Smart graphics for visual people
I just read about an extremely cool feature coming in Office 2010, thanks to John Goldsmith’s visLog.
The new functionality will help you to remove backgrounds from images, essentially cutting out the subject of a picture and allowing your own backgrounds to show through.
[Read more…] about Remove Backgrounds From Images With Office 2010!
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!
Many Visio users create detailed elevation drawings of network and audio/visual equipment. The quality of these drawings can impress customers and enable equipment to be more quickly recognized in a diagram.
While vendors such as Altima and D-Tools provide detailed Visio shapes, you may find yourself needing to create your own shapes from time to time.
One method for creating detailed equipment shapes involves tracing an image of the actual gizmo. We’d like to offer a few tips to help you get the job done in Visio!
[Read more…] about Importing Images as Backgrounds for Tracing
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!
Today we’re going create a glass effect, using basic end-user features of Visio.
With a few simple techniques, you’ll be able to add pizzazz to your elevation drawings of windows, cabinetry, video monitors, rack-systems.
Now, maybe you’re thinking; Visio is not Adobe Illustrator, and Visio diagrams are supposed to be simple, boring, and utilitarian. A quick glance at this site might bring you to question that notion.
But don’t just take our word for it…
Update: You can now download a Visio drawing with samples shapes at the end of this article
Today’s post, like the Visio Guy web-site, is all about creating smart graphics.
We’re going to create an evergreen tree shape that fades as its size decreases. With this one single SmartShape you’ll be able to illustrate an entire forest-scene that fades into the mist. And you won’t have to format each tree individually.
You will learn how to cut Visio shapes into pieces and union the bits together to form new shapes. You’ll learn how to add parameters to shapes, and fill them with Excel-like ShapeSheet formulas create sophisticated graphical behavior. And you’ll create a context menu that resets the shape with a click of the mouse.
If you are developing solutions for Visio, then you’ve probably dabbled with VB code in Visio’s Visual Basic for Applications editor. If you’ve been in the industry as long as I have, then you know that VB means Visual Basic. Period. End of story. But if you happen to also be from Australia, then it’s a different story…
So you’ve created beautiful graphics in Visio, and you know how to add phantasmal ShapeSheet smarts to your shapes, now its time for you to make it all disappear! I often get asked how to toggle the visibility of various elements of Visio drawings, and I usually offer up one of many solutions. But I don’t think that those many solutions have ever been cataloged in a single place. Until, of course, now…