Fun with SDL Tridion Icons and Visio Stencils

You might notice the SDL Tridion Carbon theme icons in my posts. I use them often enough in my explanations that I added a stencil in Visio 2010 (under the Shapes dialogue click on More Shapes > New Stencil).

This lets me quickly add pictures, diagrams, and text to Visio designs by clicking and dragging them onto Visio's drawing area. For example I created the following building block summary and "refreshed" some existing diagrams.

Building Blocks

Not a perfect breakdown, but I grouped the Tridion Building Blocks (items) along two axis: purpose at the top and what they're mostly/sort of related to along the left. If I add some stats and arrows it'd make a nice info graphic.

Content Porter Dependencies Refreshed

I thought the SDL Content Porter diagram would look nice with the matching icons.

The Infamous Publishing Model Refreshed

You might recognize the layout from training or your last functional design.
I refreshed it with the SDL Tridion 2011 set of icons. I'm thinking of referring to this as "Tridion Item Relationships" instead.

One caution when using icons from any commercial (or even open source) software: you're limited in how you use them by copyright laws. For example, Microsoft allows the use of their product icons "in training manuals or documentation about a Microsoft product."

I'm not a copyright lawyer, but focusing on authentic sharing while respecting the intellectual properties of others has worked well for me. I've yet to get a copyright complaint out of my 308 posts. I had one small request to avoid describing support rates but mostly get comments about my tendency to create tl;dr posts.... speaking of which--oops, I'm done!