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You are here: Home / Archives for Visio Content / Shapes / Illustration

Illustration

Repeating Diamond Title Visio Shape

March 3, 2011 By Visio Guy 1 Comment

If you need a catchy title for your Visio diagram, then diamonds could be your best friend!

Today’s Visio SmartShape encases each character you type in it’s own individual diamond for that perfect Retro or Argyle look!

(Just what you were looking for, eh?)

[Read more…] about Repeating Diamond Title Visio Shape

Filed Under: Illustration, Shapes, Web Design, Wireframes & IA Tagged With: Artistic Effects, Quick Text, repeating shapes, SmartShapes, Text

HAL 9000: a Shape Odyssey

December 29, 2010 By Visio Guy 4 Comments

Dave, won’t you please read this article?

Read this article, Dave.

Dave, don’t you think you should read this article?

[Read more…] about HAL 9000: a Shape Odyssey

Filed Under: Illustration, Shapes Tagged With: shiny

Husky & Cougar Visio Logo Shapes

December 3, 2010 By Visio Guy 8 Comments

Update Nov. 25th, 2016: The most “important” Apple Cup in a long, long time. 5th ranked Washington vs. #23 Washington State. WHOA NELLY!

GO DAWGS!

[Read more…] about Husky & Cougar Visio Logo Shapes

Filed Under: Illustration, Shapes Tagged With: logos, Sport, Sports

Seattle Seahawks Visio SmartShape

October 15, 2010 By Visio Guy 3 Comments

Edit 2015 01 02: Congratulations NFC West Division Winners!

Edit 2014 02.02: Congratulations SuperBowl XLVII Champions!

Logos are fun, especially sports team logos!

The Seattle Seahawks logo is also perfect for showing off how Visio SmartShape behavior can be not only useful but cool and attractive.

Come on in and find out!

[Read more…] about Seattle Seahawks Visio SmartShape

Filed Under: Illustration, Shapes Tagged With: info graphics, logos, SmartShapes, Sport, Sports, stretching shapes, Visio SmartShapes

Visio Touch Gesture UX Shapes

June 17, 2010 By Visio Guy Leave a Comment

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 gestures in your plans.

Luckily, John Goldsmith has just released an excellent stencil of Visio touch gesture shapes to help you lay out your ideas!

[Read more…] about Visio Touch Gesture UX Shapes

Filed Under: Illustration, Web Design, Wireframes & IA Tagged With: John Goldsmith, multi-touch, touch, user-interface

Get Web Hex Color Values from Visio Shapes

May 14, 2010 By Visio Guy 5 Comments

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 more and more folks are using Visio for prototyping web sites and user interfaces, I thought it might be useful to create a SmartShape that displays the hexadecimal color value for a particular shape.

[Read more…] about Get Web Hex Color Values from Visio Shapes

Filed Under: Illustration, Shapes, ShapeSheet, Web Design, Wireframes & IA Tagged With: Artistic Effects, Color, ShapeSheet, ShapeSheet Formulas, Smart Colors

Faking 3D in Visio

December 10, 2009 By Visio Guy 13 Comments

faking-3d-in-visio

Today I saw a question in the Microsoft Visio newsgroups.

Stefan wanted to know how to make a 3D arrow look like it was going through a rectangular plane.

Of course I couldn’t resist the opportunity to do some drawing, plus it seemed like a nice topic for today’s Visio 3D drawing tutorial!

[Read more…] about Faking 3D in Visio

Filed Under: Illustration, Power User

Visio Tutorial: Advanced Fill Effects

September 9, 2009 By Visio Guy 12 Comments

advanced-fill-effectsWhile I was writing about the Visio Spectrum Shape the other day, I started thinking about the various ways that you could use this eyesore fabulous explosion of color in your own Visio SmartShapes.

While the spectrum offers a rainbow of tints, it only comes in one form: RECTANGLE. So what if you want to spice up some arrows, or circles, or…flowchart shapes?

[Read more…] about Visio Tutorial: Advanced Fill Effects

Filed Under: Illustration, Power User Tagged With: Artistic Effects, Custom Patterns, Fill Format, Gradient, Mask, Tutorial

Visio Spectrum Shape

September 2, 2009 By Visio Guy 5 Comments

visio-guy-spectrum1A 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 electromagnetic wavelengths, or going for the happy feeling that a rainbow gives, a colorful spectrum can help clarify your message.

Visio does not have multi-stop gradient fills that make spectra a no-brainer to create. With clever formatting and grouping, however, you can build a passable spectrum shape. But why bother doing it yourself when we’ve got a pre-built shape, waiting for you to download (for free)?

A visible-light spectrum can be used to illustrate many concepts. A few that come to mind:

  • Electromagnetic waves
  • Solar-energy concepts
  • A range of choices
  • A family of products
  • Levels of threat to national security (stop laughing!)
  • Sunshine on a cloudy day

Whatever you want to illustrate, our Visio spectrum shape is easy to use and quick to deploy.

Since the spectrum colors can be a bit overwhelming, I’ve added a feature to quickly set transparency and soften the effect. Just right-click the Visio spectrum shape:

You can easily set four levels of transparency. They look like this:

spectrum-shape-transparencies1

All in all, it’s a pretty simple shape to use.

Once you have mastered the spectrum shape’s features, you possess the power to create vision-destroying graphics like this:

spectrum-eye-pain-11

or this:

spectrum-eye-pain-21

Sorry about that.

Stuff like this can be used to make sure your audience is paying attention when you present your next PowerPoint at Monday’s status meeting!

But if you must get real work done, then you could use the spectrum shape to enhance your business diagrams, as shown in this concoction:

the-browser-spectrum1

or this one perhaps:

computer-spectrum1

Enjoy the spectrum shape!

Download “Visio Spectrum Shape”

s!Aj0wJuswNyXlhyiZlqlm5IuyTlsm – Downloaded 3647 times – 103 B

Filed Under: Illustration, Shapes Tagged With: Artistic Effects, Gradient, SmartShapes, spectrum

Twitter @WordCloud #Visio

June 30, 2009 By Visio Guy Leave a Comment

visio-word-cloud

Tweet, tweet! Twitter is getting REAL BIG. No one is  sure exactly what it is or…why. Attention deficit disorder gone nuts? The best source of at-the-moment trends? Customer data goldmine? Are we turning into chirping birds?

And all across the net, it’s raining word clouds! Clumps of words, where each has a different font-size or color to emphasize importance or frequency. Arranged this way and that to fill up the space, or to make a cool design. You’ll see them on blogs and on data-visualization sites everywhere.

Recently, occasional Visio-poster and creative guy in-general Saveen Reddy sent me an e-mail informing me that he had brought Twitter and Word Clouds together in the Visio arena.

[Read more…] about Twitter @WordCloud #Visio

Filed Under: Beyond Visio, Illustration, Shapes Tagged With: Data Visualization, twitter, word cloud

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