10 Design Elements You Can Use In Your Next Pages Document

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some design elements you can use in your next Pages document. 

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Now when you're creating a long word processing document often that document could just be page after page of solid text. But you can breakup that text with various design elements. Here's how to create those in Pages. 

So the first one I want to show you is called Drop Caps. This allows you to take the first letter or few letters of a paragraph and emphasize it by making it larger and cover more lines. So, for instance, for this first paragraph here I just point my cursor in there, you can see it blinking, and then on the right I go to the Format sidebar and then under Style I go down to the bottom and there is Drop Cap. I'll switch that on and you could see that first letter, I, now appears really big. I can scroll down further and see that there are more options. I can choose from various styles. Like, for instance, I can choose this style instead and it will encase that letter inside of a box. If I click on Options here then I get complete control over all sorts of different aspects of Drop Cap including how that box looks. A Drop Cap helps you see the beginning of a new paragraph. 

Another way to do that is to have some space between paragraphs. Some I'm going to select all with Command A here and you can see I've got various paragraphs but it's hard to tell where one paragraph ends and another begins. However under Format and then Spacing there's Before Paragraph and After Paragraph. Now if you're going to do this for all paragraphs it really doesn't matter which one you use. I like to use After Paragraph and increase it to a certain number of points. So let's say 8 points here. You could see now with 8 points separating each paragraph the text is broken up a little bit. It's much easier to differentiate each paragraph and thus read through the document. Once I've got this done notice how the Body style has an asterisk next to it. I can simply use Update and now the Body Text Style has these 8 points after each paragraph built-in. So any new paragraphs I add will behave the same way. 

Now another way to tell where the beginning of each paragraph is, is to add indentation. So with my cursor here in the first paragraph I'm now going to go to Layout and you could see now there are indents there. I can add Indent for the first line of the paragraph like that. I could set it to any size I want. So here I'm just going to leave it at a ¼ of an inch and you could see how Body Text Style now has an Update that I could apply and it will apply to all the paragraphs. 

Now it might be nice to sometimes have a divider line between paragraphs. You may do this actually by just inserting a blank line and putting a bunch of dashes like that and then go to Format, Style and then Center and it will work. But what will be nicer if you actually had a real line there. So I'm going to erase this and I'm going to go to Shape and I'm going to insert a line right here by clicking on the line. It is the first item under Basic Shapes. Now you can see the line there. I'm going to drag one end of the line so it is horizontal like that and position it right where I want. Now I want this to stick with the text so I'm going to go to Format and then Arrange with the line selected and change Object Placement to move with text and in-line with text. This will place it like a character in the text. I'll put the cursor right before the line and put a return there. I'll get rid of this extra little paragraph here. You can see how this nicely fits right there and if I add more paragraphs before it will move down. I can put the cursor in that paragraph right there, go to Format, Style, and then Center that line. So now it is nice and centered. No matter how long I make this line it will recenter itself. Now I could also go to Format, Style, and with the line selected I can change the line style. So, for instance, I could change the type of line. I could make it a dotted line. I can use one of these special brushes here, like that. I can change the size. I can change the color if I want. If I like how this looks and I want to use it somewhere else I can actually select it, like a regular character. So I'm going to put the cursor after it and maybe just to make it clear that you're selecting it I'm going to use Shift and Left Arrow to select the character to the left. I can Copy it and then I can go to a new spot, add a new line, and Paste that in. 

Now you don't have to just use lines for that. You can use any Shape. So I'm going to insert another shape here. Nice shapes to use for dividers are Ornaments. So I'm going to choose an ornament here on the left and I'll choose an ornament, say, like this. Now you can see how I get this right here. I'll do Format, then Arrange, Move With Text, and Inline with Text, and now you can see where it is. I'm going to select it and Cut it, Command X, and then Paste it on its own line like that. Then I can Center that line and have this nice shape. I can still click to select the shape and I can resize it, if I want. I could, of course, select from many different shapes here. I could also do a curved line. I could use the Pen Tool and draw my own line. 

Another thing you can use is a Text Box. So this is useful when you want to insert some text between paragraphs to breakup the paragraphs and maybe emphasize something. So I'll create a new Text Box here and I'll enter some text. I could select some text here and just reuse that and Paste it in. For this I can restyle the text. Let's go here and take away the Indent, under Styling I'll Center it, I'll increase the Font and make it Bold, and then I'll resize this text box. I can use this text box in the same way by going to Format, Arrange, and then Move With Text and then Inline with Text like that. Then I can move it to the end of the paragraph and give it its own paragraph. Let's go ahead and Center this and you could see how I can have that. I can even go ahead and change the Style here. So, for instance, I could give it a Fill, like a Color Fill, and let's give it like a gray there or maybe some other color like that, or I can make the Color Fill something dark, maybe black, and then change the text to white, like that. 

Now you can also make a paragraph standout by simply changing its margins. So I can select this paragraph here or just put my cursor anywhere in it. Then go to Format and then Layout. Let me give it a little bit more margin on the left and on the right. I'll adjust the Indent appropriately if I want and you could see how now it stands out like that. Now I can also go back to Style here and give it a little bit more space after the paragraph and then some space to match that before the paragraph, like that. What really helps then is if you just change maybe the font slightly. So I can make this, say, an Italic or give it a different text color, like that. 

Another useful thing to do sometimes is to have a Page Break especially when a paragraph ends a thought but the next paragraph is initially starting a whole new chapter. You can just go to the beginning of a new paragraph and do Insert Page Break and you could see how it just leaves some blank space here and the new part will start on the next page. Another thing you could do is with a paragraph like this if you want to all be together on the same page, just put your cursor anywhere in there and then go to Format, More. Then check Keep Lines On The Same Page. So now it is always going to make sure this paragraph appears on the same page. If I overlaps two pages it will just set it up to start on the next one. 

Another thing you could do to breakup text is to add Bullet Lists. So you can just go with the new paragraph here and then go to Format, Style, and then set a Bullet List style. So I can choose, say, a Standard one like this and I could create a Bullet List. You can continue to adjust. I'd probably get rid of the indentation on each one of these like that. Then have this be something that breaks up the text on either side of it. It could just be like a mini table of contents highlighting several points that are to come in the paragraphs following it. 

Now, of course,  you could also have images and graphics there. You can even create Info Graphics in various apps and bring them in. But if you want something quick you can always just do a chart. If you do a chart you can select one of these. Some of these take a lot of data. But you could do something really simple. Like a pie chart like this. The Pie Chart, itself, can just have a small amount of data. Just a few numbers and have a little bit of something that breaks up your text. You have more than just this option because you can also do the 3D Pie Chart and then you can get really fancy with how it looks. Anytime you have a little bit of data, like something is 40% one thing and 60% another you can always create a pie chart to breakup long unending pages of plain text. 

So I hope you found these ideas useful. Thanks for watching.