Cloud shapes

I came across a set of cloud computing images the other day and thought they’d make a nice Visio stencil set.  I contacted Josh Twist, the author, and you can now download the stencil from here.  (If you want to download the original png’s then head over to Josh’s post titled ‘Cloud Artwork’.) 

Note, all the hard work belongs to Josh – I’ve just added a few connection points and saved them as a new stencil (.vss).

To install the stencil – download and unzip the file above.  Move the resulting .vss file to either:

Your My Shapes folder

C:\Users\[User name]\Documents\My Shapes

or your stencils folder, the path for which is described in

File / Options / Advanced / File Locations… / Stencils

Raster images

As you know raster images generally don’t scale well, however the above images are fairly large (averaging somewhere around 1200 x 1200) which means they can be stretched a fair way before pixelating.  In general you would want to be careful with image sizes if your drawing is likely to contain a large numbers of instances.  In this case, given the abstract nature of the shapes, I think it’s unlikely that you’d see a diagram with 500 instance shapes.

Anyway, they’re a great set of shapes and I hope you find them useful.

[Update 18.04.12 - If you're after other cloud shapes then Visio MVP John Marshall recently sent me this clever shape.  It's based on a line pattern and so scales and alters shape, in a rather pleasing way, as it's resized (click on the image to download)]

Comments

[Ulrich]

Beautiful, thanks for sharing! The only thing left out is Queue Service.

[Fernando Correia]

Thank you, this is indeed very useful. I only miss a "generic" Internet cloud.

[joe]

Great job.
is there a way to get just the computer (minus the cloud) as well??

[Dave Saunders]

These Visio cloud shapes are awesome! Do you happen to have non-cloudy shapes for IT bits that match this style? Like bare iron servers, workstations, laptops and tablets? :)

[Dan]

Exactly what I was looking for! Compliments the Servers and Network stencils. Great job!

[Ken]

I've downloaded and tried to install. Visio is warning about a potential security threat and asking to enable macros. What macros are embedded in the shapes that would cause Visio to raise a flag?

[John Goldsmith]

Hello Ken,

Thanks for the comment. I've just checked an xml version and you're quite right, there's a old VBA project tag lurking in there. It was just code that I used to generate the shapes with so it's harmless. If you can bear with me until tomorrow I'll strip out the old code remnants and upload a clean version.

Best regards

John Goldsmith

[John Goldsmith]

Ken, All uploaded. Hope that stops the code warnings. Let me know how you get on.

Best regards

John Goldsmith

[Jeremy]

Beautiful. Thanks for sharing those, they will enhance a diagram I am producing to explain to people how all our IT works!

[John Goldsmith]

Glad you like them Jeremy. Thanks for the comment.

[Josh OBrien]

Good Stuff man! I appreciate the work!