Adaptive Path returns to DC for their User Experience Week 2006. Bigger and better than last year, the conference will feature a variety of guest speakers (including yours truly) and two tracks of sessions. For the first time, AP is bringing in guest keynote speakers, including Steven Johnson and Michael Beirut. Other speakers include Kevin Cheng, Steve Portigal, Rashmi Sinha, and Jared Spool. It’s like a mini IA Summit, right in our own back yard!
Looking forward to seeing you there!
A few years ago, I was browsing through the work of DC’s own Dan Willis, a talented designer who has worked for the likes of the Washingon Post and PBS. In several diagrams, he used a circular callout, not unlike a dialog balloon from comics. At the time, I sought to create a similar shape in Visio. My desire to make it highly flexible, however, thwarted my attempts… Until today.
For a flow chart I put together today, I created a circular callout that doesn’t require any ShapeSheet manipulation and is pretty robust. It just goes to show you, it may take a few years to solve a very simple problem.
In my initial attempt a few years ago, I tried to create a single shape that maintained its proportions no matter how it was manipulated. Today, however, I simply glued two shapes together: the circle and the tail. Here’s an excerpt from the flow I created today that shows the callout in action.
Part, the first: The Circle
Create an ordinary circle. Set the fill to an appropriate color, and turn off the line formatting. Set an approprate text formatting.
In the Snap & Glue dialog box (in the Tools menu), make sure “Shape Handles” is checked under Glue To.
Part, the second: The Tail
For the tail, create a rectangle, oriented horizontally. The width of the rectangle should be about the same as the diameter of the circle, and about half the height.
Choose the pencil tool and select the rectangle. Green, diamond-shaped handles will appear at the vertices of the rectangle. Click one of the right-hand vertices. It will turn pink. Push the delete key. The rectangle will become a right triangle. Click the remaining right-hand vertice and drag it to the middle of the height, forming an isoceles triangle.
With the triangle selected, open the Behavior dialog box, which is under the Format menu. The very first radio button in this dialog box says “Line (1-dimensional)”. Click this radio button.
The vertices will change. If you drag any of the vertices, you’ll notice that the shape behaves differently, pulling in one dimension, like a line.
Format the triangle with the same fill and line properties as the circle.
Drag the wide end of the triangle to the middle of the circle. The center of the circle should light up red, indicating that the tail is glued to the center of the circle.
At this point, make sure the tail is behind the circle. With the tail selected, you can hit CTRL-SHIFT-B to send it behind.
With the tail still selected, open the Protection dialog box, under the Format menu. Check Height and Begin Point. This will ensure that you can’t accidentally detach the tail from the circle, and that the tail width remains consistent. Here is a sample callout without formatting and with the tail selected.
Note the tail’s shape handle in the middle of the circle is grey, indicating that it is locked.
You can group these shapes together, but it’s not necessary, and would require you to ungroup them to move the tail around. You should be able to resize the circle without affecting the tail at all. When you create copies of the callout, be sure to copy both the circle and the tail.
When you move the circle, the pointy end of the tail will remain in place, and you’ll have to move that separately.
Feeling lazy? Download a Visio document with the callout.
No, there hasn’t been a lot going on at greenonions.com. Behind the scenes, lots of changes. First and foremost, my son was born on Friday!
