Use Pages’ layout features

With Pages on iOS, you can do much more than word processing

Pages is often described as a word processor – even by Apple – but word processing is just part of what it can do. It includes powerful graphics tools that enable you to create very complex designs with very little effort, and its text layout features give you complete control over even the smallest details. It’s the ideal app for designing a flyer or a newsletter, a brochure or a catalog, or anything else your creativity demands.

Of all the things Pages offers, our favorite is simplicity. Pages has an uncanny ability to know what you’re trying to do and to help you do it. For example, if you’re dragging images or shapes around, it provides alignment guides for perfect positioning – and as we’ll see in our tutorial, it can do some incredibly clever things with a couple of taps on the touchscreen.

In our tutorial we’ll create two kinds of publications: a newsletter and a flyer. We’ll explore some of Pages’ text layout features including text wrapping and alignment, bring in images and make their backgrounds transparent, and we’ll show you how to create commonly used items such as pull quotes and text flashes.

One of the downsides of the early desktop publishing days was a rash of bad design: given access to lots of different fonts, shapes and image tools, some people attempted to use every single one of them on their one-page posters, with terrifying results. We’re sure you’ve seen plenty of similar examples over the years.

When it comes to designing documents, less is usually more: one great image and headline will be much more effective than a huge lump of text peppered with tiny pictures. That’s particularly true with flyers, posters and anything else that needs to attract people’s attention. Pages’ tools are great – just try not to use all of them at once.