How to Use Color Effects in Pages

Add spice to Pages documents with color-shaded shapes and backgrounds

Apple's aesthetic consists of white space and minimalist design. It even applies to the templates in Pages. Your projects don't have to be quite so black and white, however, and Apple provides plenty of tools within Pages to help you add color. Using shapes is one such route to spicing up your designs, but many users don't look further than the simple color fill available from the tool bar.

There are many ways to enhance this basic color selection and one of the best is to apply a gradient to a shape. A gradient is a simple merge between two colors at either end of the shape, with the simplest gradient being a gradual transition from black, through grey to white. Pages provides an option to apply a two-color gradient as the fill color for a shape, with the user selecting the two colors from the color wheel. Beyond that, the Advanced Gradient Fill – the focus of this tutorial – allows for more than one color to be used and a number of blending options to be applied. A gradient of this type can produce a colorful and attractive backdrop to a Pages document that features the colors you are already using or intend to use in your project. Rather than just a plain white background, a shape filled with a colored gradient can make text and images really stand out as well as enhancing your document as a whole. Gradients within shapes can also be used for banners or as sidebar backgrounds in newsletters, among other uses.

In this tutorial we'll show you how to apply an Advanced Gradient Fill to a shape and use that shape as a background for your Pages document. You can work with an existing project and use colors that match it as you follow the steps, or simply launch a blank project and use the same colors we've used.

---

Original Page: http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_use_color_effects_pages

Sent from Feeddler RSS Reader

Regards,

Derik Chan