How To Make Signs With Mac Pages

You can easily create one-page signs in Mac Pages using Page Layout mode. Add text, symbols, arrows, shapes, borders and more. Save them and reuse them by changing text later on.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to create signs using Mac Pages.
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can  read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
So one thing you can do with Pages on your Mac is create simple one page signs that you can print out. So in Pages I'm going to start off here with a blank document. The first thing I want to do is I want to switch to Page Layout mode. So go to File, Convert to Page Layout. Agree. Now you are in Page Layout mode. The body text is gone and you can just add elements to the page. Under Format, in the sidebar here, if you have nothing selected you should see Show Header & Footer. Let's turn that Off. We don't need that for a sign. Then let's go to View and then Show Rulers, so we see Rulers there. I'm going to reduce the Zoom to something smaller so I can see the entire page on the screen which makes it easier to visualize what's going on. Now let's add some rules around the edges. So we are not necessarily creating margins because we can put things wherever we want on this page. But this gives us some guides so we don't get too close the edge. So I'm just going to drag from the rulers down or across to bring up these yellow lines that are guides that will make it easy for us to see where we are and make sure we don't get too close to the edge. So I am a   ½ inch from each side. 
Now to add some text I'm just going to click on the text box here to insert a text box and let's create a simple sign here. I'm going to type some text into this text box and I'm going to do Command A to select All the text. Go to Format Text and then I'm going to increase the size to make it larger a little bit. Let's also pick out a nice font. So you can pick whatever you want. I'll pick this one here. Center it. Now let's position this box up near the top. I'm going to grab the edges here by grabbing those little dots and bringing it over so I have plenty of room to make the text even bigger. Now I'm going to double-click inside. Command A to select All and continue to make the text bigger. Eventually it is too big for the box but I can expand the box like that. Maybe if the spacing is a little too much I can decrease the spacing here. Let's also make this Bold. There we go. So now it's looking pretty good. Now I want to put something like an arrow pointing to, you know, which direction to go in. So a lot of different ways you can go there. You go to Shape and you can use this kind of arrow here. Position it and make the line larger. Like that. You could also go to Shape and Search for Arrow and you can find an arrow shape here. Then I can stretch that to whatever I want. Use this green dot here to reshape the arrowhead. 
Then the cool thing about this is I can go to Format, Style and I can actually set a border. So I can create a border like this and increase the border size. Let's change the color though to something like that. Now we have a cool color like that. You can even change the type of line and get something fuzzy around the edges or whatever to grab attention. Now I want something at the bottom. I'm going to select this text here instead of creating a new text box and starting over again with the font and size and all. I'm going to hold the Option key down and Drag and that will create a duplicate of it. Then I'm going to select All in here and put in some other text. Let me shrink this box here and I can position it nicely. Let's change the Font color. I'm going to triple click in here and select everything. Go to Text, change the color to red. Then here as well. I'm going to change the color to green. Then I've got my sign! 
Maybe I want to put a border around it. I'll go to Shape. Go to Basic and select Rectangle. Then I'm going to cover the entire thing with the rectangle like that. Then what I'm going to do here is go to Format, Style and then set a border to something like this. Kind of a fuzzy border and then I'm going to increase the size for that. I'm going to set the Fill here to No Fill. Now you can see I've got something like that. Maybe I want to select this box here and bring it in a little bit to get it a little bit further away from the edges, like that. Maybe adjust the text boxes as well until I get something that I like. If I want another alternative to the arrow I could add another text box like this and I can type in here a special character or an emoji. So Control Command Space brings that up. I can do point. Let's search for that. I come up with some emoji hands that point. I come up with some other types of arrows and things. There's some old fashioned hands like this one here. I like that. Let me select it. Let's go to Format, Text. Make it bigger like that. If it is pointing in the wrong direction I could always go to Arrange and then Flip Horizontal. Like that. Of course I can change the color of this as well. That is just another way to go. 
Let's try another sign. I've set everything up the same way here to bring in Page Layout. Adding these guides here and now let's go and add a text box and let's say this is a sign that you're going to post somewhere for people to take a phone number. So something like Guitar Lessons. Then let's make that larger here. Maybe pick a more fun font. Like that. Let's move this box here. Center it. You can even have it centered vertically like that. That button there. Change it so it is a little wider. Like that. Now let's maybe do a shape and let's search for guitar. There are a couple of guitars in there. Let's select this one. Make it larger and then I'm going to hold the Command key down and click on a corner and then drag and I can rotate it. So we can rotate and resize. Let's go to Format Style. Change the Color Fill to something like a gradient fill. Maybe an Advanced Gradient Fill here. Radial Gradient like that. We can adjust this as we like. Set the center like that. We can also do a border here. Line and then set a border. Let's Option Drag here and put something else. Select that. Go to text and shrink it down. Like that. Arrange things like we want. 
Now the idea is we want to have little tabs here that you can, kind of, pull off the sign. Let's go to Shape again, Basic, and do a Line. I'm going to put one end of the line right here and the other end here. This is going to be a guide for pulling it off. I'm going to do Text and then let's put what we want here. Guitar Lessons and the phone number and let's increase the size for that. We make it Bold. Then we'll shrink this down to be something like that. Let's then turn it 90 degrees. Instead of using Command and then pulling it like that I'm going to go actually to Format, Arrange and you go to Rotate and let's rotate negative 90. That actually sets it to 270 there. So now you've got these little tabs. So you could put these here at the bottom of the page. Then what you want to do is you want to do Option Drag and drag a bunch of them. Don't worry about whether or not they match. Let's just get a bunch of them like that. Then select them All and now what we're going to do is go to Arrange and then we'll Align Objects to the top. So they are all aligned to the top. Now we can drag them all together so they are down below that line. Now we're going to do Arrange, Distribute and Distribute Horizontally. That will make then all evenly distributed horizontally. But this last one here wasn't at the end. So let's pull that in a bit. Now let's Distribute Horizontally again. Now they are perfectly even. Now we print this out and the idea is you just use a scissors and cut between these so people can easily tear them off. 
Let's create a warning sign now. I'm going to do Text. I'm going to do Warning with an exclamation point! I'm going to select that. Then I'm going to, you know, put this up here and stretch it across. Select the text in there again and I'll go to Format, Text. Center it. Let's make it nice and big and bold. Be nice if that was all caps. I could type that all caps or I could click here. Go to Capitalization and do All Caps like that. Let's Option Drag down and then put No Diving. Like that. Position it down here. Now we want that big, you know, circle with a line through it. You would think there would be a shape here that would have that. But it doesn't. No problem. We can make that. 
Let's do a circle. I'm going to make the circle just as big as I need. Holding down the Shift key will keep its ratio so it will still be a circle, not an oval. Let's make that big like that. Let's put that somewhere in the center of the page. Now I'm going to Option Drag again so I have two of these. But with that second one selected I'm going to go to Format, Style and change it to some other color. Doesn't matter what color. Just something you can use to distinguish it between the black there. I'm going to center it over. Then I'm going to hold the Option  and Shift key to drag down. Now you can see how it resizes it holding this in the center. So I want to make it so that this outer part is the right size. Now I'm going to Shift Click to select both of those circles. Go to Format,  Shapes & Lines and Subtract Shapes. So it cuts a hole and we just have one shape that is like this. Now let's go to Shape and then square and I'm going to drag it so it's goes across. I'm going to drag it so it is a bar, basically about the same width as this outer circle here. Now what I'm going to do is rotate it. So Format, Arrange and let's rotate it at a 45 degree angle like that. Now I'm going to select both of these. So using the Shift key go to Format, Shapes & Lines. Unite Shapes. Now you have one shape that's like that. I can now go to Format Style and set the color to Red. 
Now all I need is a diver. If I go to Shape and look for Dive I do get a scuba diver. Let's start with that. I'll make the scuba diver larger and what I'm going to do here is go to Format, Shapes & Lines and Break Apart. Now each of these is a separate thing. I can select the parts of the tank and use the Delete key to delete them. If I wanted I could even delete the head and replace it with a circle instead of somebody wearing the mask there. But we'll keep that like that. I'm going to Shift Click to select the three parts here. I'll do Format, Shapes & Lines and Unite Shapes. Now it is back to one shape. I'm going to do Arrange and then send it back so it is behind this. So now you've got a nice little No Diving sign. 
Now what about creating a horizontal sign. You can do that using the blank landscape template or you can just start with the regular blank template. Let's shrink this down and then let's go and set it to Page Layout like before. Let's turn off the Header and Footer. Let's go to Document here in the sidebar. Notice you have Page Orientation. Let's switch the Page Orientation. Now we've got a horizontal sign. Now let's go and create a different type of sign. This is something you might typically see to warn you of danger. I'm going to create a rectangle. I'm going to put it in the upper left hand corner and drag it across like that. I'm going to create a circle and I'm going to put it in the center and I'm going to go to Format, then Color Fill and make it a dark red. I'm going to drag the left and the right like that and the top and the bottom like that. Then I'm going to go to Format, Style, Border and add a line. Let's make that line white and now you can see it kind of looks like the beginning of a sign you might typically see that has something like Danger in the middle. Let's select Danger there. Go to Text. First I want to go here to Advanced Options and do Capitalization like before so it is all caps. Then I'm going to increase the size until it kind of fills this. Let's make it Bold as well. Now you can see a typical Danger sign like that.
Let's create another shape, a rectangle, and put it down here for now like that. We're going to adjust the size of that in a second here. Go to Format, Style and let's set the border to black and make it wide. Let's do the Fill for the middle to No Fill. Now let's bring the edges in a bit. I actually want to create a thicker border because we don't know how the printer is going to print this so I want to have a nice thick border here. Then we'll drag this like that and we can drag this here as well. This gives us a little extra room here for the Danger oval. Now I'm going to use Text and create a text box here and we can type something like this and let's do the same thing here with the Capitalization. Set this to All Caps. One of the advantages to this is you can change this to something else and as you type it doesn't matter if you're holding down the Shift or not, it is always going to be capitalized. So now we can increase the size of this. Make it Bold here. Stretch this across and center it. Keep making it larger. Now you have a nice sign that hopefully when a little bit of the border is trimmed off during printing it would still look decent and you can easily reuse it. So you can save this here and then reuse this Danger sign and just change the text here and print out new ones.
So I hope this gives you some idea how easy and quick it is to create signs in Pages. You can then save them, reuse them, make changes to them and all of that. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 4 Responses to “How To Make Signs With Mac Pages”

Kim Appleberry

2 years ago

Thanks, Gary. I have made hundreds of signs with Pages but I still learned new things from your tutorial.
One thing I would add is that we can export these as pdf's and take them to FedEx Office and get them printed on their giant printer so they can become sandwich-board signs or other sizes up to 3 feet wide!

Doug Smith

Gary, your signs tutorial is one of the most helpful yet. The fine points you bring out has changed my work from amateur to pro! Thanks

Jeanne Bragg

I am a little late watching this but SOOOO IMPRESSED.
I do things like this constantly and so many tips helped--hot to make all caps, how to format shapes and lines to fit.
It was like taking a mini-Udemy course.
Thanks for all your tips and hints, which I use DAILY.
You're the best.

John Konopka

I haven’t made hundreds, but I have made a number of large posters for scientific conferences that I print at FedEx or similar. I don’t know the maximum size Pages will handle. I have made posters up to six feet wide. I usually print as cheaply as possible because these are for temporary use, however, the printing shops will print these on more durable materials if you need a sign for a restaurant or other shop.

Comments Closed.

How To Make Signs With Mac Pages

Comments: 4 Responses to “How To Make Signs With Mac Pages”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information