Mac Design Out of the Box

by Andrew Shalat

How to achieve great design on your Macintosh - without spending a penny on software Fun, full-color guide shows Mac users how to design for film, print, and Web using nothing more than the tools that... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0321375742
• ISBN13: 9780321375742
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Peachpit Press
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 1.07 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 7.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

no-frills design with Mac's bundled software

The premise of this book is that you can do reasonable and useful designs without big-name design software, using just the software that Apple bundles with the Macintosh. The premise is mostly proven: As long as you stick to simple designs you can turn out professional-looking print materials and web sites. Tools used are TextEdit (rich text mode), AppleWorks, screen capture (surprisingly useful), and the iLife suite (iPhoto, GarageBand, iMovie, iDVD). In several sections titled "For a Few Bucks More" the book also discusses the Pages and Keynote tools that are more powerful but not bundled. The book assumes that you have AppleWorks, which will be true for most readers although Apple sometimes bundled it with new Macs and sometimes did not. I think the book is most useful as an introduction to some of the powerful features of these programs. Who knew that Keynote could create Flash files? Or that persons with no musical knowledge could make reasonable soundtracks using the built-in loops in GarageBand? I learned many new things from this book. The book is written in a discursive, almost stream-of-consciousness style. This can be enjoyable to read but it makes it hard to follow the step-by-step procedures: The narrative breaks into a digression occasionally, and you either forget what you were doing or you miss some important step. The book doesn't teach you design per se, although many of the digressions deal with design issues. A good book for no-frills design is D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself (Design Handbooks). This is late-2005 book so it has not been updated to the just-released iWork '08 and iLife '08, and it doesn't mention that AppleWorks has been discontinued. There are a number of much more detailed tutorial books on these programs (the Missing Manual series from O'Reilly is especially good), but Mac Design Outside of the Box is enough to give you a good start.

Good for non-designers to maximize their Mac Investment

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

Design away a crisis using Mac tools alone!

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.

easy creative design

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.