OfficeArt Effects Series #1: Soft Shadows
OfficeArt is the graphics platform for the Office System. This is the first in a series of posts covering OfficeArt's new graphic effects.
"Soft Shadows" are realistic shadow effects that simulate the penumbra of a shadow (i.e., the fuzzy part.) These effects are a staple in graphics programs like Adobe Photoshop and are commonly seen in websites, magazines and on television.
Office 2003 has a set of shadow effects but all of them used a less realistic "flat" rendering of the shadow. You can set the transparency of the shadow but not the softness of the shadow edges.
In our customer visits and reasearch we frequently hear requests that people would prefer to have all the drawing and graphics tools they commonly need built into Office. We found many examples of customers using separate graphics applications to achieve a result as simple as adding a soft shadow.
Office 2007 now supports several new shadow types and all of these can have the soft shadow effect. In PowerPoint, soft shadows can be applied to shapes, pictures, text and the various elements of charts, diagrams and tables. Word and Excel also support soft shadows on most graphic objectss.
Here are some examples of standard offset soft shadows generated in Office 2007.
Office also supports several additional specialty shadow types including inner and perspective shadows. The same soft edge effect can be applied to these shadows. Here are some examples:
Pretty cool, huh?
The UI for applying these shadows is a simple dropdown gallery. There is also a dialog that allows you to adjust many of the parameters of the shadow.
The settings shown in the dialog above correspond to the "big" offset shadow example earlier in this post.
Soft shadows are often used on text. In PowerPoint there's even a top level button on the Home Tab to apply a simple offset soft shadow. Additionally, we put those shadow effects to great use in our WordArt Quick Styles. For example, an inner shadow effect is carefully set to produce the "cloud" WordArt style below.
Most of the time you won't even have to set the soft shadows yourself. You'll simply get them automatically as part of the Office Theme you are using. Our Visual Designers have used this effect for many of the Quick Styles you'll see for pictures, charts, shapes, SmartArt, WordArt -- even tables in PowerPoint. The shadow effect is combined with colors, fonts, special fills and even 3D effects to produce a complete look that you can apply in one click.
In upcoming posts in this series we'll be covering all of OfficeArt's other new effects including glows, reflections, realistic 3D and more.
Howard Cooperstein
