CONTINUED… Design a brochure in Pages

4 Resize or move

As you might expect, you can resize images by dragging the points on the edges and corners. If you move your image, guides will appear to help you line up your images with the other ones on the page.

7 Kill more colours

By default, the Instant Alpha only removes one colour, but if you drag the mouse or trackpad you can make more colours transparent. Be careful here: if you overdo it you’ll find that your images start looking really weird.

10 Line it up

Use the Zoom button at the top left of the screen to see how your page looks in full and check that the design works. That G4 Cube is odd: it should really fit into the first column or sit behind the entire page.

5 Edit the mask

If you find that the picture is too big for the space allowed, go to Format > Image > Edit Mask. You can now move the image around or resize it so that it’s just right on your page without being cut off or too big.

8 Put it back

If you want an image to appear behind everything else you can use Format > Arrange. Sometimes, though, you’ll see something like this grab above: our image is behind another image that has a solid background.

11 Add your text

Adding text in Pages couldn’t be simpler: just highlight the text you want to replace and type or paste the new text. Use the Format panel to adjust fonts, sizes, colours and spacing to make things just-so.

6 Alpha better

If your image has a background colour, you can remove it by opening the Format panel and then selecting Image > Instant Alpha. If you click on the background of your image it will now appear in cyan.

9 Use Alpha again

You’ve guessed it: we need to use Instant Alpha to remove the background colour from the image in the foreground. You may find that text now appears around it. To stop that, use Format > Arrange > Text Wrap.

12 Have some fun

Pages really rewards exploration: the old ‘what does this button do?’ approach often uncovers great features. Here we’ve experimented with alphas and masks to put a big Mac image across multiple columns.