Yesterday I wrote briefly about getting to work on a poster to present at a conference in a few weeks. After working on it for a bit, I’ve decided to switch to Pages from OmniGraffle.
While OmniGraffle is certainly more than capable for the task, I’m finding it almost too flexible. In the same way that I’m drawn to outliners for writing, I’m drawn to Pages for a little more structure in the layout process. I could probably figure out how to make OmniGraffle give me that structure, it’s already done for me in Pages.
I created a new document in Word Processing layout, which may not seem intuitive for layout work, but it keeps me from having to fiddle with making all the text boxes individually. After creating a new file, I changed the page size to my poster dimensions – 30 inches wide and 40 inches tall in this case. Then I put in the title and author details and inserted a layout break. After the break, I set the layout to 3 columns and let the app automatically size them.
Gravitropic 