Elements for iWork vs Graphic Styles

June 19, 2015

Now that we’ve already discussed the templates for Pages and Keynote in our previous posts, we’re moving on to the various products for enhancing and customizing the content created with the templates. We’ll start with Elements for iWork and Graphic Styles, because they are similar in many ways yet have different uses.

The current incarnation of Elements for iWork includes 262 items in 4 categories: 51 kits of badges and ribbons, 61 sets of clipart images, 80 batches of fun doodles in various styles, and 70 sets of polished icons. Each set includes multiple images in one consistent style, so the end result is literally thousands of beautiful illustrations (to be honest, we’ve never bothered to count them all). You can use them to put some spark into your slideshows, to illustrate your self-published books, to liven up your classes, or to retouch your website. As a matter of fact, we probably haven’t listed 1% of all the ways these nifty images can make your work easier and prettier.

While the primary purpose of Elements for iWork is to provide eye-catching illustrations, the Graphic Styles collection is more about all that surrounds them. The app contains 191 items in 5 categories: 10 sets of backgrounds (a new category, which will certainly be growing in the future), 23 sets of funky bullet styles for your slideshows, 20 kits of character images for creating a one-of-a-kind headline, 81 batches of image frames, and 57 collections of colorful patterns. You can create entire Keynote themes by combining these elements in unique ways, and the popularity of the Pages version of Graphic Styles shows that they’re great for books, greeting cards, and more.

Both collections are available in both Toolbox for Pages and Keynote. Once you have selected a style you want to use, open it in one of the two formats, copy the selected item, and paste it into your document. Some items come in Pages/Keynote native shapes and are fully editable, and some are PNG images, which you can arrange in Format > Image Styles.

By the way, we will soon be launching our Community page, where you can suggest styles and themes for future updates. Stay tuned for more information!

Comparing Our Products for Pages

June 5, 2015

Continuing with the series of posts on our products, we’ll talk about our four sets of templates included in Toolbox for Pages: Inspiration Set, Business Mix Set, Stationery Set, and Corporate Style Packs.

At the moment, Inspiration Set consists of 445 templates grouped into 13 categories such as Books & Albums and Newsletters & Magazines. It’s a wide-range collection with no specific purpose, so you can find pretty much anything in it, whether you need design for an ebook or a set of jar labels. Some of the templates have multiple sections such as text pages, covers, photo galleries, etc., which you can combine in whichever way you want.

As its name suggests, Business Mix Set is tailored to companies in need of various templates. The set includes 228 designs in 10 categories, ranging from marketing and sales materials to project management forms. There’s plenty of flyers, brochures, newsletters, business cards, invoices, envelopes, and other types of print materials commonly used by small and medium businesses.

Stationery Set is the Pages equivalent of our Mail Stationery app and contains 169 unconventional templates for letters. Whether you want to leave a cute get-well note to a family member or send a striking newsletter to potential customers, you can find an appropriate design in Stationery Set’s five categories.

Finally, Corporate Style Packs is a collection of 12 template packs, each containing 36 templates in matching designs. They can help you create a consistent look for your company, from business cards to memos and timetables, for a fraction of what it would cost to hire a graphic designer. Naturally, all templates can be easily customized in Pages to match your existing corporate symbols.

In fact, you have lots of freedom with all our templates: you can change the colors and the fonts, add your own images and logos, and even combine sections from different templates. If you have Elements or Graphic Styles for Pages, you can also make use of the unique icons, patterns, bullets, and other items provided in these apps. Every design is a solid starting point but your own creativity is what determines the end result, and that’s exciting, isn’t it?

News on Our Standalone Apps

May 22, 2015

As you might know, we discontinued most of our standalone apps for iWork a few months ago and transferred their content to the Toolboxes. That was great news for tens of thousands of our clients. However, it turned out to be less lucky for those of you who previously owned the standalone apps and missed the chance to buy the Toolboxes at a discounted price.

Therefore, we’re now not only working to bring Themes for Keynote, Business Mix Set, Elements for iWork, and other much loved apps back but also redesigning them to match the new look of the Toolboxes. That includes the clean and convenient browsing space, full-size preview images, and brand new app icons.

The relaunched apps will contain all the new designs that have been added since they were discontinued. They will also be updated regularly, just like the Toolboxes.

We’re planning to submit the first three redesigned apps (Themes for Keynote, Layouts for Keynote, and Infographics) for Apple’s approval next week. Stay tuned to be the first to find out about the upcoming changes!

Comparing Themes & Layouts for Keynote

May 8, 2015

Today we’re introducing a new series of posts designed to help you learn more about our products for Keynote, Pages, Mail, and MS Office for Mac. In this series, we’ll give in-depth explanations of how various product sets work and how you can make the best of them. We’re planning to publish new posts every couple of weeks, so stay tuned.

We’re kicking off with a side-by-side comparison between two sets that you can find in Toolbox for Keynote: Themes for Keynote and Layouts for Keynote. While both collections deliver tens of unique styles for your presentations, they serve slightly different purposes.

The Themes for Keynote set consists of 71 themes (and more coming), which have broadly the same capabilities as Keynote’s stock themes and are great for text and image-heavy presentations. You can choose among 32 master slides, which cover various layouts of bullet text, images, or a combination of both. You can also add Keynote’s stock charts with their colors and fonts adjusted to match the design of the theme.

Layouts for Keynote offer 51 designs at the moment, each containing 20 master slides. In contrast with Themes for Keynote, the layouts do not follow the standard theme structure and mostly focus on visualizations instead, so they are perfect for data driven slideshows. The visualizations include various custom charts, diagrams, maps, lists, and other elements. Many items are embedded and can only be changed by editing the master slide, but Keynote makes it very simple—just click the “Edit Master Slide” button when it pops up.

Both sets cater for various visual styles, from the minimalistic Cool Air and classy Gabardine themes to the colorful Multi Vitamin and playful Sketch Art layouts. Whichever design you choose, you can easily adapt it to suit your company look and use it as a creative springboard for a top-notch slideshow.