Mac Design Out of the Box (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Learn how to use the basic design tools that already come with your Mac—iLife, AppleWorks, TextEdit, and more. What if it were just you and your Macintosh stranded on a desert island? Would you have the tools and skills necessary to design your way out of the situation—to create a flyer to stick in bottles, a Web site to alert people to your situation, a movie to document your adventure? If you’d remembered to bring along this handy guide, you would! In this witty and engaging full-color book, author Andrew Shalat shows you how to accomplish a surprising number of design projects using the Apple iLife, iWork, and AppleWorks suites of applications, .Mac services, and the tools that come with Mac OS X.

Andrew shows how to create the projects using the simplest Mac tools, from TextEdit and Grab. Then, in sections called “For a Few Bucks More,” Andrew demonstrates how to create the same projects using the tools that are part of Apple’s own easy-to-use and powerful software suites and services.

Divided into three main sections—print, Web, and video—this book demonstrates how to:
•   Make postcards, flyers, business cards, and logos  with TextEdit, AppleWorks, and Pages.
•   Put together Web pages using .Mac, iWork, iPhoto, AppleWorks.
•   Make videos using iPhoto, GarageBand, and iMovie.

Plus, the book offers up plenty of tips and rules of thumb to guide your design.

About the Author

Andrew Shalat has been a designer and writer for over 25 years. He bought his first Mac in 1985, after seeing one in a friend’s architecture studio in Florence, Italy. Since then, his articles about the Mac and Mac software have appeared in many prestigious publications, including Macworld, maccentral.com, and macweek.com. Andrew’s design work covers a large range of media, including book covers, brochures, catalogs, CD and DVD artwork, logos, and plain old fliers. Over the past two decades, he’s taught literature, writing, Web design, and print design. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Peachpit Press (December 3, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321375742
• ISBN-13: 978-0321375742
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,056,827 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars easy creative design, December 27, 2005

By	W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Shalat shows why the Mac is justly renowned for easy, creative design. He focuses on the programs that come bundled with every Mac. He starts off with the basics of designing a two dimensional area. A flyer, postcard, logo or business card. Using essentially the same methods, he guides you through simple variations of laying out text and graphics in a pleasing manner.

Going further, he expands the ideas into the making of web pages. This is necessarily more involved. But the impressive thing is that the Mac's software lets you mostly downplay the explicit coding in HTML. Instead, you can focus on the more creative aspects of composing a page. Not unlike making a flyer, in fact.

Finally, he gives a very brief introduction to using GarageBand to compose audio and video in an integrated fashion.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Design away a crisis using Mac tools alone!, March 17, 2006

By	D. Donovan, Editor/Sr. Reviewer "California B... (California, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

If you had no reference for the Mac, would you be able to design your way out of a crisis using Mac tools alone? You would if you also had MACDESIGN OUT OF THE BOX, a guide to using the basic design tools already laded with the Mac, from iLife to Safari. Chapters organized by different goal - printing, web design, video and movies - make it easy to link the tool to the objective, while color screen shots, sidebars of information, and step-by-step detail make for an excellent, easy guide.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good for non-designers to maximize their Mac Investment, November 13, 2006

By	D. Greenbaum "DoctorDave™ www.clickhere... (Lawrence, KS) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I consider myself a pretty darn good computer technician, but when it comes to design, I'm like a bull in a china shop. I can fix Illustrator or Photoshop crashes, but I don't know the first thing about a path or a bleed (is that what that knife is for--to bleed?). I was excited to learn some basic design principles from this book. More importantly, I wanted to learn them without having to buy expensive software like Quark or InDesign.

Andrew Shalat deserves quite a bit of credit for tweaking lots of performance out of the basic applications that come with most Macs. Who would of thought you could do basic design in TextEdit? He earns the title of MacGyver of the Mac Design world. While I found his writing rather cheesy (he pretends the reader is stranded on a desert island and then starts a fruit import/export business), he teaches the reader how to make basic flyers, business cards, web pages, movies , soundtracks and DVDs. The target audience for this book is the Grandma or little league coach who wants to make some basic yet professional publicity materials for their organization.

This is not a tutorial about iLIie or iWork, this book is strictly project focused. MacDesign out of the box requires no previous knowledge of any of these programs. Statler walks you through the principles step by step with great screen pictures of any confusing steps. He also explains the design principles of what you are doing, so you can apply them to your individual projects. After reading the book, I feel much more comfortable using the basic Mac software to create a nice identity for any organization--however all my designer friends will still have a job for sure.

Pros: Excellent explanation on how to use the iLife and iWork suite to create flyers, business cards, web pages, and movies. Great book for someone delegated publicity duties for any organizations.
Cons: A bit cutesy. I'd prefer a straightforward explanation than an over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek approach. Not everyone has iWork preinstalled on their Mac