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)]

[Update 14.06.14 - There's also a new Azure stencil download available here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=41937]