pages rocks

i’m thoroughly amazed by apple’s new word processor called pages and how easy it was for me to use this weekend.

how could one make a word processor significantly easier to use? let me demonstrate. our meditation group is hosting a class that started this monday. many of the participants i figured would be fans of our teacher pema, since the material for the class was hers. i wanted to hand out a flyer to the participants to let them know about upcoming programs at our center and pema’s teaching schedule this summer, as well as give them some information about our small group. i had content to make a flyer, and i have some aesthetic sense, but i am not a visual designer. pages to the rescue.

a new document in pages starts with a very strong set of templates to chose from. templates are not a new concept, but pages does a really fantastic job with them. i tried out a couple sample layouts until i have a visual design i thought might look good and a color scheme as well. then i just started dragging and dropping pictures and text into the document. i had a folder of pictures that i had the rights to use for a flyer, and all the text for pema’s summer programs, and since there were three events i selected a second page from the template’s set of six page formats that had a nice three column layout. the whole process took me only an hour, for an awesome two page color layout. in microsoft word this probably would have taken me four times that long to get the formatting right, but the real benefit from pages’ templates is that i doubt i ever would have come up with such a nice layout and image placement on my own. so it was like having my own visual designer helping me out. here are the thumbnails of the newsletter to give you an idea of how they looked:

(i won’t upload the whole flyer because the files are so big)

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