Using Pages to Create Social Media Assets | How to Series with Nellie Beavers

Hey everybody, it's Nellie with Apples and Oranges. Today what we're going to do is we're going to use a built-in app on your Mac, Pages, which is a word processing app, but it's so much more, to create social media assets in all the different sizes that you need for all of your different social campaigns. So let's get started. So one of the things you'll want to do if you are making graphics in Pages is you want to turn off the document body checkbox. So that happens up here in the document settings. By default, you'll usually see the formatting settings, and if you check over to the document settings, you can uncheck document body. If it's already checked off, when you uncheck it, it will ask if it wants to convert to a page layout document. And when you do that, it will remove any text that's in your document already. So just— I do that right at the beginning of the document before I do anything else, and I go ahead and say convert. This is a template. I'm going to actually put the link to this template in, um, in the description below. And so what I've done is I've given you the main social media image sizes, and these are not necessarily the pixel sizes, but they are the right ratio. So if you're doing something quick and just you needed to do something fast and easy, this is a great way to do it. This panel, which is based on our campaign, which was to get people to subscribe to our YouTube channel. So how we're gonna get started is by making sure that we have the right sizes of box. And what I do is I just go— I always go check and double-check the sizing on the boxes. But let's say, um, social media image size.

Sizes.

So sproutsocial.com does an always up-to-date guide to social media imaging sizes, and so when you click on that, they will give you all of the most recent sizes. The social media platforms change their sizing all the time, so you'll want to definitely reference this when you're about to do, uh, some sort of campaign. These— it says right here, share the most common forms of sharing on Facebook. So that's 1200 by 630. So I'm going to come back to my document here, and I am going to go over to Format. I'm going to click on Arrange, and that's going to give me the size of my box.

So it's 1200px by 630px.

There we go. That's the right size. So once I've gotten the right size, notice it's bigger than my page. This does not really help me, does it? So what I'm gonna do now is constrain the proportions of the box and then reduce it to the size of my page. And what that does is it keeps it the same ratio. And if it's the same ratio, then we can deal with the pixel size in a little bit. I'll show you how to do that in a while. So now we're ready to make our Facebook image. So when you're in the document you may see the toolbar up here at the top. And I like to view the sidebar that actually shows the different pages in the document. So I like to go View and check off Page Thumbnails. And that shows me what pages are in my document. And if I click through them, I can actually go directly to that document. Now, one of the great things about Pages is all of the shapes and the vectors that they have built into the application. So I like to go ahead and click on shapes, and I'm going to do a rounded-edged rectangle. And notice if I put it on top of this black box, it's not going to show. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn it white. I'm going to come over here to the styles. I'm going to make the color fill white. I'm going to give it a border that is orange. And I'm actually going to choose this border, which is a little bit more stylized. I'm going to make it 4 points to make it skinnier. I can make it really fat, or I can make it really skinny.

I like a 4-point line for this, and I'm going to change the color.

Now I could do the colors that are built in, or I could click on this little rainbow and I could make any color in the rainbow at all. And I could come and slide the, the brightness or the darkness of the colors. I can go ahead and slide the color around. Notice that the color of the line of that border is changing. I can also change the opacity, which I'll show you in a few minutes. I am going to make this color orange, which I already have saved because I know that's one of our branded colors. And I am going to make the box a little bit wider. Now when I slide it onto the black box, you can see it, and I'm going to type in it. And all I'm going to do is double-click, and that gives me typing access. Now why are the letters not showing up? That's because the text is also white. So when I double-click on the text, notice it says subscribe is highlighted. I'm gonna come over here to the text panel and I'm gonna turn the text color black. I'm also going to change the font to one of our branded fonts. Now if you notice, I have a little bit of shadow on these letters, and how I get to that is I highlight my letters, I highlight my text, and in this little gearbox here we have some extra options. And when you first click on shadow, that looks terrible, but that's because the offset is way too far. I'm only going to make it 2 points, and I'm actually going to make it gray so that it's not black on black and then you can't tell the difference. And now if I zoom in, you can see that these letters have a little shadow on them. I actually want the shadow to come from a different direction, so I'm going to highlight this again, and I am going to bring the angle down. Now notice what's happening over in the— on the letters. The shadow is circling the letters as I turn the dial. So I'm actually going to have my shadow come from down below. And that looks pretty good.

I have an exclamation point in the other one, so I'll put it in here too.

Now, in this case, I am going to just copy and paste this click here box. I'm going to go ahead and hit Command+C for copy, and then I'm going to click on this page on the sidebar, and I'm going to hit Command+V, and that is going to paste this box in here. Now, this is a little bit different sized than this other, this other box, so I'm going to make this a little bigger. Here's a great tip in Pages: if you have multiple sizes of text and you— or even one size of text in a text box and you want it to expand it to fill the box or reduce it to reduce the size and fit it into the box, Command+ and Command- will increase and decrease the size. So I'm going to hit Command+ and Command plus plus plus plus plus plus plus plus plus plus plus plus plus plus too much Command minus, Command minus minus minus. So I just hold down the command key and then hit plus plus plus plus plus or minus minus minus minus. And that will allow me to increase or decrease the text within the box without having to highlight it and without having to worry Whether or not I have everything selected. So I really like that feature. I'm getting to one of my favorite parts of pages, and that is the masking tool. To be able to do this, I wanted to have the picture of the window that comes up when you click the link that we're trying to get people to click, because sometimes it's a little bit confusing for people. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the website that we're asking people to, people to go to, which is nycoc.org/subscribe. Subscribe, and that will push me to YouTube and prompt the subscribe button. Great, that's exactly what I wanted to happen. And now what I want to do is take a screenshot of this. So I'm going to do Command+Shift+4, and when I do Command+Shift+4, you notice I get this little crosshair, and when I drag this crosshair across the screen, notice I get a highlighted section, and when I let go, I get a screenshot of whatever is in that bounding box. So I'm gonna let go, and notice my screenshot came up over here, and all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna drag it over to my Pages document. And if you notice, I get a blue box around the window. So if I take it out, blue box. Take it out, blue Blue box, take it out, blue box, the blue box is surrounding the window. When I see that blue box and the little plus sign, I can actually let go and my image is going to come into the document. Now, if you notice, that is a little strange looking. It's a little bit off-center, um, the subscribe button is kind of funny, the window is bigger than I want it to be. So now here's the fancy trick. I'm gonna notice right now that the bounding boxes that I have on this image are little white boxes. That will allow me to change the size, right? Now I could go like this and I could put it here, but that doesn't show the part of it that I really want to show. It's weird.

This is over off-center.

Now if I double-click the image, notice that my white bounding box turns to a black bounding box. And that allows me to crop the image. What I can do is I can actually mask this image so that I can center apples and oranges. I can center the subscribe button. I could actually make this smaller so that it's more accurate. Now that looks good as far as my subscribe button is concerned, so I'm going to hit enter. And now I have an image that's a little bit better here. It fits a little better. Additionally, notice that the one I have up here is— has the green border, the similar style to the other borders. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to come over here to Style. I'm going to select the line border. It already knew what style I wanted. I'm going to go ahead and change the color. Again, I have our our branded colors saved. And how I saved that was once I had the color over here, which I had picked from our logos— so actually, I'll show you how I did that. So I grabbed the color dropper, which then will select any color of a single pixel. Notice that when I hover over this A, I have a circle which zooms in for me, but in the middle of that circle I have one tiny little box that one tiny little box is the color that it's going to pick up. In this instance, there's only one color, but in a lot of like images and pictures, there are multiple colors because, you know, colors are actually gradient, and especially in photos. So you have to be careful which picture— which color you're actually picking up. It's not just the whole group because there's at least 3 colors in there that I can see. So I'm going to go ahead and select the main color of this image A, and then all I do to save it is I just drag it into these little boxes and it stays. So once I've saved a color, I can then apply it anytime. So now I've made this box, um, the color that is our branded Apple A color, and I can go ahead and make this a little bigger now. Great. Now if you notice This is kind of tricky because now my subscribe is underneath of the screenshot that I had, but I want it to be on top. I want to layer it on top. So what I do is I right-click and I say bring to the front. Like, if I say send to the back, it goes behind the black square. So I'm going to send my black square to the back. And it'll send the black square back behind everything. And I'm actually going to go ahead here and say Bring to the Front. Perfect. Now to my taste, the Subscribe I would like to be a little bit bigger, and the That's All We Ask of You I would like to be a little bit smaller, but I also want to bring them closer together. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to highlight the Subscribe, and I am going to go plus, plus, plus, plus, plus. And now I'm going to do Command+A to select everything even though I can't see it.

See everything.

And I'm going to come over here to this Line Spacing in the Text panel, and I'm going to reduce that by a couple points. Not that many. I think 8 is good. Uh, 0.8, sorry. And I'm going to reduce the size of this text also. Now I can do it over here. I would— I could have also done Command It's really no different than saying this little up and down arrow here. In fact, when you hit Command it activates that button. And when you hit this button, it activates Command+.

So it's the same difference.

You can also type something in.

If you know you need it to be 100 points, you could type it into that box. I think that that looks good.

I'm also going to bring the click here to the front. And I'm going to bring it— I'm actually going to make it a little bit—

I'm going to rotate these.

So how I do that is I hold down the Command key while I hover over the bounding box. And I can just then twirl it all around any way I want it to go. So I'm gonna do that, I'm gonna do that, and I'm gonna put some arrows in here so I can show exactly, exactly where I want people to click. This is advanced. This next step is a little bit advanced, but what I do is I actually have in my keyboard settings, I actually have the ability to show emoji and symbols.

And this is how I did this. Yes, it is.

I searched arrow here, and I found an arrow that I liked, which was this one right here, and I just typed it in. So if I come here and I click on my text box, then I double-click the arrow, and it'll actually insert it. Now it's tiny and it's black, so let us increase the size.

And because my main box is black, I want to make this a different color. So I'm going to go ahead and make it our green.

And to be honest, I keep closing this window, but I normally keep it right down here for myself. And I would like to put a shadow on this, so I would do that the same way I put the shadow on the text, and that is by clicking on this little gear, clicking shadow. And what I want to be sure that I do is put the shadow coming from the same direction as the other one did now. This time, I don't want it to be a black shadow because it's going to be on this black box. And so what I want to do is I want to go to my regular color and I'm going to pull the darkness down. So it's the same hue but a different, a different level.

Yeah, that's good. I like it. And then I'll pull this up here and I'm going to make the bounding box a little smaller.

And I'm actually going to rotate this the same way I rotated one of the squares. I hover over the corner bounding box and I hit Control— uh, Command key and I rotate at my leisure with my mouse. First I want to put the arrow to click here and then I'm going to do another one. So I'm going to duplicate this arrow by hitting Command+D. That's for duplicate. And then I have another one here.

I'm going to rotate that, and I want it to subscribe here. Now because this is a little bit different, I'm going to change the offset here to 3. I'm going to do the same thing on this one. 3. Great.

And on this arrow, I actually want to make it orange, our branded orange.

Our apples and oranges orange.

And notice I selected it, but it didn't change anything. If that ever happens to you, you can just drag this up to the text color and place it. Notice the little blue bounding box around that green. When I release the orange, it'll turn it orange. It'll turn the arrow orange as well. I also want to change my shadow color to a darker orange.

So I'm going to come over here and I'll make that a darker orange.

All right, great. Now there's one last thing that's a little silly about this. My Apples and Oranges logo is a little bit off-center, and so I'm gonna do a little bit of shenanigans to make it look good.

And what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna make a little black box to go over this, right?

I'm gonna group it with this, so I'm gonna hold the Shift key down and I'm gonna grab the other box. So notice I've got two bounding boxes here, one with the screenshot and one with the little box that I just laid over, and I'm gonna group them. And then my subscribe and my click here's jumped out from under it again, and so I'm gonna say bring them to the front. But notice now my logo is gone, and when I click this, the box and the screenshot move together. Well, what I want to do is I want to add the logo on top. Now I actually have one here, but I would— I could pull it in from one of my saved items, but I'm going to copy this. I'm going to click here and I'm going to paste it.

It didn't pull down, that's okay. And now I'm going to make this a little bit bigger.

I'm just going to set that on there, and that brands it a little bit better for us. And so now— oh, where's my orange? Good, send that to the back.

And now send that to the back.

There's my arrow, great.

And then I'm just gonna copy this, then click here, and I'm gonna paste it.

And what I'm gonna do on this one is I'm actually gonna say what the website is, so What I need to do is I need to make this smaller.

I'm going to say nycoc.org/subscribe, and it's going to be too big for the line, but that's okay because I am going to reduce the size.

When I triple-click the line, I go click, click, click instead of double-click, which is click, click. When I triple-click the line, it'll highlight the entire paragraph. So each line that has a paragraph marker, all the text in between that. And I'm not gonna say "click here" because on Facebook they can't click here, they just say "visit." So I'm gonna say "visit." Great. Fantastic. So now I don't have to do that over and over and over again. In fact, if I had wanted to, I could have taken all of those assets from this one I had already created. But now I want to translate that. So now my Facebook one is good in size. Now I want to translate it to a Twitter and an Instagram and an Instagram story. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to just hover over all of these items. I'm going to click and drag a box over these items. And then I'm going to hold the Shift key and unclick the main, the background, the black background that I have. And then I'm going to do Command+C. I'm gonna click on my Twitter size, Command+V. Now, the reason we're doing all different sizes is, like I said, the different social media companies have different size images. If we were to put that Facebook image onto Twitter, it would chop off parts of it, and I want to be sure that whenever I'm putting a branded piece of media on social media, I want to be sure that I'm making it the right size for each of the channels so that whoever is looking at my piece on that channel, I'm actually— they're seeing everything I want them to see. There are ways to get around this. There are ways to make one piece that fits in all of the, all of the different parameters, but this is the most exacting way to do it. So I already have that, the Twitter size templated out for you. And so now what I could do, maybe, is group all of these images and resize them all together. Now if you notice, it messes up my text, but for the most part, the images actually fit okay. And what I'm going to do now that I've gotten them kind of inside of the box that I want them to be, and I'm going to ungroup them And I'm going to click on each of the text boxes, and I'm just going to do Command until what I want in the box is fitting.

So click on this one.

That's great. I'm actually going to make this a little bit less space between them as well. And then that.

Then click here. Everything looks good.

And now my Twitter is done in about 12 seconds, right? Now I'm going to do the same thing again here. I'm going to click on this page, Command+V. That— now this is kind of a mess. So Instagram takes us to a full square. You could do one of those, the horizontal images on Instagram. However, if you're in your profile, it will still crop it to square. So I don't really like to do a horizontal image in Instagram or a a longer, a 4x5 image in Instagram, unless I know that the primary information that I'm putting into that image is going to be in the center, or if it's a photo and I really don't care if it crops. That's not the case here. So what I'm gonna do on this one is I'm gonna change the design of it a little bit, and I'm not sure what I'm gonna do yet, so let's see. We're gonna find out together. So I definitely want this up at the top because people read from top to bottom, left to right.

So I'm gonna go ahead here, and I know that this goes to the bottom because that is the last step.

And so now I have to figure out where this visit goes best, and I think I might make the whole thing a little bit smaller.

And with Instagram, there's another piece to it because you can't just put the link anywhere. You have to put it in the bio. So I'm going to make one more piece for Instagram post, and that is going to be a little link in bio square also.

Actually, I'm going to turn this one around.

So again, I hold the Command key down, and I'm going to just give them a little shout out here. And I'm going to make one more little box.

Actually, I'll copy this one so it's the same. So copy, Command+C, Command+V to paste.

And I'm just going to say "link in bio," and I'm going to erase all of the rest of it and reduce the size of this.

Command minus.

I'm going to bring my spacing a little bit better together.

Yeah, good. Just another couple seconds. And now I'm going to do one more, and that's for the Instagram story.

So again, Actually, I'm going to take these items, so I'm going to grab this and this and this.

I'm holding the Shift key down while I grab all of these. I could have also done a big swipe over, but I just want to show you another way to do it. And you'll want to just make sure you've got your bounding boxes on all of those. Command+C, come to my Instagram story, Command+V. So I've pasted, and now again I'm going to right-click and I'm going to group them so I can reduce the size.

Size a little bit easier.

A little more.

Instagram stories tiny.

Now all my text is all messy on this one, but that's okay because I can just Command my way to it. So ungroup again. If you notice, this arrow is kind of funky monkey right now, and that's because the text is too big for the box. So because this is a text arrow, not a graphic arrow, I'm going to do command minus, minus, minus, minus, minus, minus, minus, minus, minus, minus. Or what I could have also done, which I'll do on this orange one, is I could have just made the box bigger.

There's. There it is. In this case, I'm going to make the box bigger a little bit plus, plus, plus, plus, plus.

Okay, Command minus, and I can just hold it down also.

Hold that minus down. The next thing that I like to do is just take a screenshot of them.

Now, if you can, what you want to do is make the size on your screen as big as you can, and that way when it reduces down, it'll actually be the right It'll, it'll make the, the image look more fine. And that's it! Now I have 4 social media items. I will pull them up.

Let's see what they look like together.

So now we have all 4 of the images: the Facebook, the Instagram, the Instagram story, and the Twitter version, all as PNGs on the desktop. And so what I'm going to do is I am going to export these via AirDrop to my phone so that I can have them directly on my phone and upload them from there. So as you can see, there are a lot of things that you can do in Pages. Thanks so much for watching. I hope this was helpful. Be sure to subscribe to our channel to catch the latest videos from Apples and Oranges.