I first bought iWork when I launched a glossy magazine for English speakers in Normandy, France, back in 2006. We were working on a shoestring, and the idea was to upgrade to a fancy creative suite as soon as the publication started making money.
Well, the magazine looked great and was a huge success, but I never did replace iWork—I didn't need to! Once I started exploring the creative possibilities of Pages, iWork's graphic and page layout program, as well as the spreadsheet application Numbers and the popular presentation maker Keynote, I discovered iWork could do everything the more expensive design software options offer.
I started jotting down the design tricks and technical solutions I discovered, and when these notes became too numerous to keep track of, I turned them into a blog, I Work in Pages. Soon, I was sharing tips with Mac users all over the world, and eventually I was approached to expand the blog into this book.
It's not a manual. In fact, I don't even think of it as technical. I prefer to call it a "Renaissance exercise". It is for those who, like myself, enjoy discovering that it is possible to do what may have seemed impossible only yesterday—or even a few minutes ago. Just like the great men of the Renaissance did.
Above all, this book concentrates on the design and production of print publications and on using graphic tools in iWork to create sophisticated images. I mostly cover Pages, but the main tools, menus, and techniques are the same for the other two programs in the suite. If you are interested in keeping your quality high but your costs low, this book shows you how.
Chapter 1, Lateral Thinking, discusses the approach to using iWork. In the first recipe, What to do when color options disappear, we will learn how the hardly noticeable button at the top of a document can save us from a moment of panic. In the second recipe, Copying and pasting from Numbers to Pages, we will explore how iWork applications work together, so that you can pick and mix to find the best creative solutions. The third recipe, Stacking photos by using the Bring to Front and Send to Back options to layer photos, shows how images can be layered and that graphic design is easy and accessible to all iWork users. In the fourth recipe, Using Command + F to search long documents when editing, you will discover that the Find function that you may only have used for checking text has a much wider use, and not only within iWork, but also right across your Mac and on the Internet too.
What links the recipes in this chapter is the approach. You will see that trying a few advanced tricks in iWork opens up the creative possibilities that you may not have been aware of.
Chapter 2, Working with Text, gives ideas on how to make your text look more attractive. It includes tips on when to use which tools or menus to change the appearance of text. We will also look at more sophisticated tricks, such as fitting more text on a page than it seems it can hold or making your document appear to have more text than it really does. You will find recipes on creating strong graphic elements for your text, including smudged highlights and drop caps.
Chapter 3, Working Across Platforms and Applications, addresses the compatibility issue. The recipes in this chapter show how Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents can be imported easily to their corresponding iWork applications—Pages, Numbers, and Keynote—by using a simple drag-and-drop operation. We can do this straightaway from the Internet or through the Share option in iWork.
The Making a good PDF from an iWork document, and CMYK PDFs for professional printing recipe in this chapter gives tips on working with professional print shops.
Chapter 4, Where to Find Shortcuts and How to Remember Them, describes where to find shortcuts and how to train yourself to use them without thinking. Shortcuts offer a quicker and more efficient way of working. We will also look at iWork-specific shortcuts, and why Undo and Redo are probably the two most important of all.
Chapter 5, Working with Photos: Tips and Tricks, covers basics, such as resizing and cropping a photo, and also introduces a more advanced way of using photos, for example, removing and changing backgrounds and making cutouts. Inserting a photo into a document is only the first step towards discovering the numerous inventive ways in which you can use pictures and images in iWork. You will learn how to use masking and Instant Alpha in design and how to use patches to improve the photos in your documents.
Chapter 6, Graphic Design—Working with Clip Art and Making Your Own, discusses where to find clip art on your Mac and how easily you can make your own clip art. Recipes in this chapter show how to make your own photos into clip art. Following a few simple steps, you will learn how to put photos inside letters and customize different shapes to create unique clip art for your own projects—for example, turning a quote bubble into a thought bubble.
Chapter 7, Graphic Design: Making Your Own Logo, shows how to create your own unique logo by using shapes and letters. The recipes in this chapter cover procedures for editing shapes and manipulating widely available fonts to create your own, personalized set of fonts. Using the draw tool, you can create a human shape or a picture of a dog and an advanced technique allows you to trace a photo or a picture to create your own original image to use in a logo.
Chapter 8, PDFs and Professional Printing, offers tips and solutions for meeting the requirements of professional print shops. Mastering PDF production is an essential element in using iWork for professional print purposes. In this chapter, you will see how to make your iWork document into a press-ready PDF, with your settings, and how to deal with situations where you don't have sufficient software or technical knowledge.
Chapter 9, Planning Large, Long-term Projects, describes how to use iWork for creating promotional literature and serious publishing projects beyond the scope of what we normally expect to accomplish with a personal computer. With iWork, we can create beautiful brochures and logos and produce books. In this chapter, we will discuss the basic operations that are necessary to accomplish your dream projects, working with and modifying templates, designing eye-catching titles, and planning and preparing a book.
Chapter 10, Designing from Scratch: Beyond Templates, explains how templates included with iWork provide instant design solutions. Nevertheless, no template can fit all our requirements, and there comes a point when we want to create our own distinct style and a design tailored specifically for our project. In addition to basic layout principles, this chapter describes design techniques that you will need when you are prepared to go beyond the templates. These techniques include editing shapes and lines, using flowing colors, creating your own original brand colors, and storing and classifying them.
Chapter 11, Mastering Numbers: Tips, Techniques, and Fun, gives tips on how to spruce up your spreadsheets. Even if you are unfamiliar with spreadsheets, you will see that Numbers is not only easy to use, but also that it is handy—and fun—for many practical tasks that have little or nothing to do with calculations. In the last recipe, Using clip art and photos in charts—the unbeatable visual effect of Numbers documents, you will see how to add photos to pie charts and incorporate clip-art human figures into sophisticated diagrams.
Chapter 12, Keynote Uncovered: a Few Techniques, covers the basics, such as adding text to Keynote slides and placing and editing photos. Keynote is a much-loved application for its striking graphics and animation effects. We will also look at how adding audio files to slideshows and making QuickTime movies from Keynote slideshows improve your efficiency when working in other iWork applications.
The Free Download Chapter, Building a Team and Working from Different Localities, covers issues arising from working in today's virtual environment, where we have spread our workload across geographical boundaries. The recipes in this chapter cover sharing, sending out, uploading, and publishing iWork documents, as part of a team. This chapter gives recipes on how to organize teamwork, particularly with editors and designers. You can download this chapter at http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/Building a Team and Working from Different Localities.pdf.