Visual Effects -- Soft Shadows on Rectangles and Circles

I have a Program Manager on my team named Matt who is a whiz at extracting cool effects from existing Visio functionality. One of the things that he’s discovered is the ability to combine Visio’s gradient support and shadow support to create a soft shadow for squares, rectangles, and circles. Soft shadows give a professional touch to these basic shape. For example, this flowchart looks pretty nice – the soft shadow adds a subtle dimension to the shape. I can apply a similar effect when creating a flowchart from circle shapes as well.

You create a soft shadow for a square by applying a shadow to the square shape and assigning it a square-like pattern. To get a soft shadow for the square shape, I went into the right-click menu for the shape and set the color to the soft green, the pattern to 36, and the pattern color to 01. (Transparency stays at 0%.) I then used the Shadow section of that same Fill dialog box and set the Pattern to 35. I left the rest of the settings alone, so Style as 01, Color as 01, Pattern at 00, and Transparency at 0%. By setting the Shadow Pattern to 35, which is square-like, I’ve created a soft shadow for that square shape. Then I just copy-and-pasted that shape to use for the rest of the steps in my process. This pattern also works for creating a soft shadow for rectangles.

For a circle, follow the same steps to get into the Fill dialog box and apply the color settings for the appearance. In my sample, I set the color to blue and the pattern to 36. In the Shadow section, though, I set the Pattern to 40, which is circular in nature. That creates a soft shadow for the circle shape.

Because this effect is dependent on the nature of the Shadow pattern, you can’t just apply it to any shape. But once you create it, it’s a great shape to use in simple, business-oriented flowcharts.

Enough of this visual effects stuff! On one of my earlier posts, a reader complained about how darn hard it is to just line up shapes so the connectors don’t run jagged. In the next couple of posts, I’m going to focus on the things that you can do to make your drawing experience quicker and easier.

-- Mai-lan

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