10 Ideas For Styling Title Text In Pages and Keynote

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at ten ways to make title text standout in Pages and Keynote.

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So whether you're creating a document in Pages or some slides in Keynote sometimes you want Title Text to standout. You could simply change the style to something like Title and then you get a larger font size and it's Bold. What if you want to do more than that. You want to make this text really special. So let's start by changing the color of the text. Instead of black let's use a color like say light blue like that. Now let's make it larger as well and let's add an outline. I'll click the Advanced Options button here and I'll check outline. Now you could see the outline there. It looks pretty good but I can make it even thicker by changing the size. I could change the type of line as well. I can change the color if I want too.

Now notice another option was to create a Shadow. A Shadow can also be used as a glowing effect. So let's turn on Shadow and you could see it adds a shadow underneath it. Instead of it projecting at an angle let's have it have a zero offset so it's behind the text. Let's add more blur. You could see the blur showing up behind the letters. Now let's change the color to something that glows like a yellow or a gold and you can see it makes the text glow. You could leave it like this with one color for the text and another color for the glow or you could use the same color for the text and you get something like this.

Another option was to add a backdrop color. We can use that to actually invert the text.  So let's take this text here and let's add that text background color. I'll click here and I'll add black as the background color. Now it's black text on a black background. But I could change the text to be a different color like white. I find it works best if you add a space before and a space after it. So here's a simpler one. You could use something called small caps. What that does is it puts everything in uppercase with the lower case letters a smaller size. So I'll select this text. I'll go to Advanced Options and I'll go to Capitalization and turn on Small Caps. So you could see how it does that. The great thing is it's preserving what's uppercase and what's lowercase here. So I can switch back from it because, of course, you could build this yourself by simply capitalizing all the letters and changing the size of these and the size of these to something else. But Small Caps allows you to switch back and forth very easily just to try it out. Then you can combine this with any other effect that I'm showing here. 

Now in addition to setting a color for text you can also use a Gradient. So we'll select the text here and I'll click on Text Color here. I can select Gradient Fill. Then you can see here it goes from one color to another. A light blue to a dark blue. But you could change these colors to whatever you want. So you can make it something more colorful like that. You can change the angle of the fill. So you could have it go from one side to the other. You can switch to Advanced Gradient fill and this allows you to then set more than two colors. So I could put a color here in the middle and change that to something and now you could see how it goes through three different colors. I could also set this to be Radial so it goes through the three colors but from the center out. You could add a bunch of different colors to this and then set each one to something in the spectrum. So I could make it, kind of, a rainbow. So I'll make this first one red and then the next one yellow, and the next one green, and then the next one light blue and dark blue, then purple, and then red. I will go through the whole spectrum here. Change the to be a regular gradient and set the angle and it would be really colorful. 

You could also fill text with an image. So let me select this text here. Then text color I'll use Image Fill and it's going to use this default pattern here. But I could drag and drop any image I want into it and you could see how it fills it with that image. You have various different ways to have it fill. Scale to Fill is probably what you want in most cases. You could also, instead of Image Fill, go to Advanced Image Fill. What that will do is it will apply a color tint to it so you can pick the color that you want and it will tint it that a color. 

Now the next effect I call Merged Outline. What would be great is if you could select text like this and then set it to a color and then add an outline and then increase the size of the outline but have it be behind the letters. Unfortunately, if you increase the size of the outline it just overtakes the letters themselves. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to break this out from the body text here and put it in its own text box. So I'm going to cut it out and then create a text box and paste the text in and then I'm going to stretch it out like that. Let's center it there and now I've got one copy of it. I'm going to set its range settings to Stay on Page with No Textwrap. Now what I'm going to do is create a second copy of this. So I'm going to Copy it and then Paste and I'll get two copies that lock on top of each other. But before I do that what I'm going to do with this one is I'm going to change this one to use an outline. So turn Outline on and then I'm going to make the outline bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Like that. Then I'm going to put it behind this and you get this beautiful effect here. The outline of each letter merges with the letter behind it but yet you still see the letters printed on top of that. You could experiment with different colors, different size outlines. Things like that. To use this I'm probably going to want to select both of these here and then group them together so now they move as one element. 

Now you can use the same technique to create kind of a shockwave effect like the letters are shaking. Let's change the color on the text to something like this. We can duplicate the selection a little easier with just Command D. We can create various versions of this. Let's set the range first to None. Now I'll make some copies here. Like that. I'll put both of these on top of the original. I'll grab the first one and then I'll rotate it two degrees. Then I'll do Arrange and send it to the back. Now I'll take whatever is  on top now and rotate that 358 degrees. Then I'll do Arrange and send that to the back.  Then I'll select what's on top here and I'll change its color and make it standout on top of the others and you get an effect like that. I can go with more dramatic change of color or even make the text on top black something like that. You could have more than just two behind it. You can do one that's 2 degrees and another 4 degrees, and another 358 and 356 to even spread these out a little bit more. You could experiment with all sorts of different things like that. Maybe even moving the ones in the background by one or two pixels. Then just grab all of them and group them to move them together.

So how about a double outline. Well, you can't do that using the regular tools but you can do it if you've got it as a text box, like this, and you create another copy of it. So I'll use Command D to duplicate that. I'll select this text here and I'll add an outline to it that's just one point and let's make it say a light gray. Then this one here, I'll select, and I'll add an outline to that and I'll make that outline black but I'll make it much bigger. Now when I move this one on top of that one and then send it to back you could see the double outline. I can select the original one just by clicking there and let's change the text color to something else. So now you see I've got gray text with a lighter gray outline around it and then a black outline around that. You can adjust the sizes of each outline to make it like you want. You could have more copies of the text box to do a triple or quadruple outline too. 

You can use a Bevel Effect to make the letters little bit 3D using the same technique. So I'm going to select this. Command D to duplicate. Now I'm going to take this one. Let's change it to black and let's add an outline and let's go up to even 4 point here. Now I'll put this on top and then I'll Arrange and Send to Back. Now the trick is to select the text on top and just use the arrow keys to move it up one and to the left one. Now you can see it creates an effect where it looks like the letters are a little bit 3D.

So there's a whole bunch of different ways to make title text standout in Pages and Keynote. Of course this is just the beginning. You can use these techniques and discover more ways to do it or combine them for more ways as well.