How To Create Signs and Posters In Mac Pages

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to make a quick sign or poster in Pages on your Mac. 

So, Pages is a very versatile app that you can use for word processing and making complex documents, like newsletters. But you can also use it to make simple signs. To do this you first need to realize that there are two modes for Pages. One is word processing mode and the other is page layout mode. So, for instance, if you go to create a new document in Pages and you choose Blank you will be in word processing mode. You can tell you're in word processing mode because you'll see a blinking cursor there, ready for you to type page after page of text. If you go to View, Show Layout you'll see this big textbox that will flow from page to page. Also, if you go to File and look here you'll see Convert to Page's Layout. That tells you you're not in Page Layout Mode now, you're in Word Processing Mode. 

So, let's start off a document the right way to make a sign or poster. We're going to go to File, New and then choose the Blank Layout template. You'll find it here under Basic though if you've used it recently it will be under Recents as well. If you choose Blank Layout then you're not going to get that textbox here that will flow from page to page. It won't be a Word Processing Mode. If you go to File and look here you'll see Convert to Word Processing, meaning you're in Page Layout Mode now. 

First let's get a good overview of the page. I'm going to change the zoom level. You can change it to Fit Page so now you'll just see the page. To get an even better idea that you're looking at a page here let's got to 75% in my case and you can see here at the bottom the page. So we really get a good idea of this is the piece of paper that we're creating a sign or poster on. 

Now we need to add some text. There's nothing here. You can't click on this and start typing because there are no elements on this page. To type text you need to type into a textbox. You can create one by clicking on the Textbox Button here at the top. If I click that then I get a textbox. It even says, type to enter text. You actually need to double click in here and it will select the text. Now I can type whatever I want. So since I'm making a sign about a work party I'll just type After Work Party, like that. Maybe an exclamation point. Now I've got a sign but it is not a very good one. Let's make this better by making this text larger and more interesting. So I'm going to use Command A to select All the text in here since the cursor was blinking in there. I'm going to go to Format, Text. Then I'm going to make it a little bit bigger. So, 13 points is too small. Let's make it 40 points. Now you can see it is bigger. Probably you'd want to make it even bigger. But let's get a good Font first. You are going to have different fonts on your Mac that I will have on mine. I'm going to go ahead and choose one I happen to have right here, like that. That's a fun font for a party. The text is still too small. Let's continue to make it bigger by clicking here. You can see it goes pretty slow so let's just type in a bigger number here like 150. 

This is better but it doesn't fit the textbox anymore. The next thing you want to do is enlarge the textbox. Click outside the textbox to deselect it and once on it to select it but you're selecting the box not the text inside. So you have all of these control points in the corners, along the sides, and I can grab one and drag it to make it bigger. I can make it much bigger and I can reposition it so it is centered. See here I can lock it into the center, like that. This font has a lot of spacing between the lines. So let's change that. In Format, Text I've got Spacing for Lines here. I can shrink that down to something that makes more sense. Point 7 makes more sense. I'll center the text, looking even better. I can play around with the style here and say change the color to something more colorful, like red. There's a lot of other stuff you can do. For instance, I can go here under Text Options and set an outline for the text and maybe make a black outline like that or maybe make it like a yellow outline, like that. Just something to make it standout even more. You can have a drop shadow if you like. Let's not have any offset for the drop shadow. But just kind of a blurry shadow underneath it like this. You can do all sorts of stuff to make the text standout. 

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Now let's add more text because there has to be some information here. To do that let's create a second textbox instead of putting everything in the same one. So we've got this second textbox. I'll move it to the bottom here. I'll double-click on it and type some information, like that. I'll select it All and  then center that text. Let's make it Bold. Let's not make it that font. Just pick something else, like this and make it larger so you can see it. There that's fine. 

Now, I can select both of these by clicking to select this one and then Shift clicking or Command clicking to select the second one. I can reposition these so they are both centered together on the page. Now we have a serviceable sign. This will do but I know you're probably going to want other elements. 

So let's go and create a border around this. I'm going to do that by creating a shape using the basic shapes and using just a square or for a little more fun let's use a rounded rectangle. Now we have a rounded rectangle but we don't want a filled rectangle. We want something that is just the outline. I'm going to use Format, Style with the rounded rectangle selected. I'm going to change the border to a Line Border and the Fill to No Fill. Now I've got a border like that, but we can have even more fun with it by changing, say, the style to have all these dots like that. Maybe make the dots even bigger. Then let's stretch this to fill the page, like that. It will kind of lock to the center so it makes for an easy sign border, like that. We can even use this green dot here to change the corner with, like that. So that's a little bit better. But you probably also want some fun graphics on it. 

One way to add a fun graphic is to go to Shape then you have all these other shapes. Like, for instance, let's go to Food. We can add food, like maybe a slice of pizza or something like that. Maybe that's misleading because there is not going to be any pizza there. But there is going to be drinks. So let's go and you add a cocktail glass. We can position this here. It would be fun to rotate it so hold the Command Key down and you can grab the corner of any element and rotate it, like that. We can go to Format, Style and change the color to something. So let's change the color to that, for instance. So that's fun. Another way to add graphics is to add more text. But instead of typing text here we'll use emoji. I'll double-click in here. I'm going to use Control Command Space or you can use the fn or Globe Key and E to bring up the emoji here. I'm going to search for Party. There's some suggestions here. Let's choose this guy. I will select him, Format, Text, and make it larger. So nice and big. You can also rotate this the same way you rotate everything else, like that. 

Now another way to bring in graphics is if you have some graphics. You can download them from the internet or maybe you just have a little collection. Here's an image file. I can Drag & Drop that in. Be sure not to drag it into a textbox, like this. Drag it to some other part so it just falls outside of everything else. We can shrink this and place it somewhere. So it would be fun to place it here. If you don't want it to snap to everything, like this, hold the Command Key down and now it floats freely as you drag it. I can now position it. If you notice that as you drag this it pushes text out of the way, it's probably because under Format, Arrange you have the text wrapping for the element set to something like automatic. Now it is going to push text out of the way. So set Format, Arrange, Text Wrap to None so it doesn't interfere with any text underneath it and now you can place it where you want. Make it the size you want. 

Now I've got a fun sign or poster. You can Print this pretty easily, like that, with just File, Print. You can also Export To pdf and export out as a PDF file so you can send it around. You can also, if you wanted to say post this online or something you can Export To Images as well and export it as an image that can easily be uploaded to any social media site or other place. You can see it is just a standard little image there. It is pixels now instead of a Pages document so anybody can view it. They don't need Pages or even need to be using a Mac to see the image. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.