10 Title Design Tricks for Pages

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some ways to have your titles standout in your Pages' documents. 

So when you create longer Pages' documents usually you've got different sections with titles. You can make these titles standout by using, say, the Titles Style or just simply making the text bold. But there are a lot of simple techniques you can use to make the titles standout even more. Now in this tutorial I'm going to stick with Word Processing documents and I'm not going to create any special textboxes or anything. All of the titles I'm going to make are just going to be plain text in the body of the document. 

For instance, at the start of my document I have one line that has a title on it. I select it and if I look in the Format sidebar you can see it got to be larger and bold by me simply selecting the Title Paragraph Style. For each of these examples I'm going to start with exactly this. Now how can I go beyond the Title Style. Obviously I can make the font size larger. I can choose a different font. I can make it a different color. But, here are some more advanced techniques. 

 For instance instead of just making the title a color, like say selecting blue here, you can change from Text Color and use a gradient fill. So gradient fill will go between two different colors. In this case a lighter blue and a darker blue. But you can change the colors to use anyone you want. So you can go between two colors if you like. You can change the angle here. You can even switch to Advanced gradient fill which gives you even more colors. Like I can add a third color like this here and have it go between three different colors. Even use a radial gradient. But even just a simple gradient, like this, you can see adds a lot of style to what would otherwise be just a boring title line. Gradients always work best when you make the font Bold or simply choose a font that is going to be thick so you can see the colors. 

Another option for a Fill is to use an image fill. So go to the same menu here and select Image Fill. It's going to use this default pattern but you can Drag & Drop an image file into it. You can see how it fills it using the image. You can choose different ways it scales or tiles throughout the text there. It is a great way to bring in colors from an image that you're using and, of course, the larger and bolder the font the more of the image you'll be able to see in here. 

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Now in addition to making a font larger and bold you can also increase the spaces between each letter to make the title look bigger even though you're not changing the font size. So to do that you want to click on this special control here for more text options. A lot of the things we're going to do are going to be in here. Now you can change character spacing. It is percentage based so you can just make it larger, like just adding 10% here you can see makes this title look so much bigger. 

Another thing you can change when you go to Options here is Baseline Shift. But it really doesn't do much if you're changing a baseline shift for everything. However, a fun technique is to change it for every other letter. So what I'm going to do first is change the baseline shift to 2 points for the entire thing. Then I'm going to select every other letter. The way I'm going to do that is select the second letter, like this, hold the Command Key down and select the fourth letter, sixth letter, and so on and go through all of the letters there. Then for those that are selected I'm going to change the baseline shift to negative 2. Now you can see you get something that looks like this, a little more unique. It may work even better if you also use the previous technique of increasing the character spacing, like that. 

An easier thing you can do is use something called Small Caps. Small Caps is also in here and it is under Capitalization. When you select this you can change to All Caps and it makes everything capital letters. Now it actually has not changed the text. If you change capitalization back to None you can see it remembered which letters were actually capitalized and which weren't which makes it really easy to change it and then change it back. If I change it to Small Caps then what I get is all capital letters but the real capital ones are a larger size. The actual size of the font whereas the lower case letters are a smaller size than those. It creates a nice way for a title to standout. Because not only now is it larger and bolder than the regular text but it looks a little different because it is using all capital letters. 

Now you also can outline characters in Pages. If you go into the Options here you can turn on Outline. Once you do you can choose the outline type, there's line type right there, you can choose the color and the size. You can see it adds a thickness to everything there. So I'm just going to leave this one point black outline there but I'm going to go back to the regular text settings and change the color to white. So now you can see the outline. Or better yet I can change it to something else, like this blue and use it like that. Then you can experiment with different amounts of outline, like doubling the width or changing the type, like that. You can also change the color. Let's make this a darker blue like that. 

Now another option you may have seen there is Shadow. You can add shadow, like this, and the default is actually offset by a lot. Let's offset by a lot less and let's set it down to the lower right. So at about 315 is 45 degrees to the right there. You can set the Blur amount, like that, and you can also set the Opacity so it will make it dimmer, like this. It creates more of an offset and a bit more of a blur. You can see I've created a nice shadow there to make it literally look like the text is coming off of the page. If you change the color as well to something, like this, the shadow stands out even more. 

Even if you knew all of those here's one you probably didn't know about. You can set a paragraph border around any paragraph of text. When you do it with a Title it creates a nice effect. So I'm going to select this paragraph here. Then I'm going to go to Layout. You can see down here there's Paragraph Borders. I'm going to set it to a simple line border, like this, and it will just create one at the top. You've got top. You've got bottom. You've got left, right but you could also have just clicked this button here to add them all. You can also round the corners which is really nice. You can set the Offset. Let's set it to something less, like this. Let's increase the border size. You can also set the border color, if you want something other than black. Then here you may want to change the amount after the paragraph just to create a little space right there. 

A similar technique is to use a background color instead. So I'm going to select this here. I'm going to go to Format, Layout and there's Paragraph Background there at the bottom. So I can select a color to use as the background here, like this. You may want to add a blank line to separate these two and you can always combine this with the border as well to then go ahead and create an effect like that. That really makes the title standout. 

Now one last one is a little different. We're going to use the Drop Caps functionality to create an interesting looking title. It doesn't look good though if you center the text. So let's go to Style and Left Justify the text. Go down to Drop Caps here and turn it On. I'm going to switch it over to this type of Drop Cap and I'm going to set the number of lines to 2 there and then I'm going to add a couple of blank lines to the text doesn't start until below it. This, by itself, may be fine. But note that you can do other things with the options as well. For instance I can change raise lines to 1 to get something that looks like that which is kind of a neat looking title. Or I can select the characters after the first one there and change this so that these use the capitalization feature for all caps like that. Then do Baseline Shift to bring this down to the middle, like that, which creates an interesting looking title. 

There's a ton of different things that you can do with the options in Drop Caps. Changing the color of the background shape there, changing the corner radius to make it circular if you want. Lots of different options. Once you get something you like you can simply Copy this and Paste it and reuse it with different titles throughout your document. 

Don't forget you can use all these in combinations. So, for instance, going back to the original gradient title here I can make this maybe a little bit better by adding a border as an outline there to it. Maybe also making it Small Caps, like that, adding a little bit of a shadow to it, like that. Maybe combining even more of those techniques. Note that once you have something you like, for the most part you can go and create a New Style, like that, under Paragraph Styles. So we'll just call this Special Title. Now I can use this somewhere else. So if I have another title here I can set that Paragraph to the Special Title Paragraph Style and you can see how easily updated it. If I change something, like let's say I go into here and I change the gradient colors to be something a little bit different, I can Update and you can see how it updates the styles elsewhere. This won't work with every single thing that we've done here. For instance, Baseline Shift has every other character being something slightly different. So you're not going to have a style that will apply that very easily. Drop Caps have their own sets of styles that you can create here. So you would have to do a combination of a Paragraph Style and a Drop Cap style for this kind of title. 

I hope you found this useful or it at least gives you some ideas. Thanks for watching.