Publish like a pro with Pages
Apple’s publishing app is free, fun, and surprisingly powerful
REQUIRES
Pages, and some photos to use in your document
you will learn
How to create stunning brochures in Pages
IT WILL TAKE
25 minutes
Pages is capable of much more than bashing out the odd letter. You can use it to create eye-popping ads, fab flyers, nifty newsletters, mouthwatering menus, and pretty much any other kind of document you can imagine. You can even use it to create ebooks, and to collaborate on documents via iCloud. We’ve used it to write books, create album covers, and design brochures, and we’re constantly amazed by how easy it is to use and how great the results are.
You can collaborate with others in real time with Pages on Mac, iPad, iPhone, and iCloud.com, easily replace fonts through an entire document, import and export Rich Text Format (RTF) files, and make use of tabbed windows to work across multiple documents without cluttering your desktop with extra windows.
This kind of stuff wouldn’t be helpful if Pages didn’t talk to other apps, but it does. You can export your masterpiece as a PDF, Word, or an ePub document, as well as RTF and plain text files, and you can send documents by email, Messages, or AirDrop, or add them to Notes. And images and movies you embed can be optimized for playback on iOS devices.
In this tutorial, we’ll use a simple brochure to explore some of Pages’ design tools. We’ll use Instant Alpha to remove the background colors of images, and explore the use of masks to control how images display in your document and how text flows around them. We’ll also look at the various formatting options for images and text, and how you can stack different elements on the page.
One thing we won’t be doing is using Pages’ media browser to organize and add images, as it can be a very slow process. It’s a minor flaw in an otherwise excellent app, and easily worked around. We’ve found that organizing our images as albums in Photos, and dragging from there into Pages, is much faster. If you’d rather not use Photos you can drag from a Finder window instead.