iStudio replaces MS Publisher or Adobe on your Mac.

10th Dec. ’13

Front of the Card with iStudio

It has been a couple of months since switching entirely to Mac. In this time I haven’t found a task that I could not do equally well or better on the Mac. That is until I needed to print more of our calling cards which I had originally created with MS Publisher. I now find out there is no way to open Publisher files on a Mac.

I searched the web for alternatives to recreate a clone of original. Adobe software is way beyond my price boundary and Apple’s Pages lacks many needed features that Publisher and iStudio have, similarly Scribus (a free download)
After much digging I found iStudio .

A free 30 day trial is offered so I installed the program and soon got to grips with it. For those moving up from using a text editor or those new to desk top publishing there are currently 34 short video tutorials available here – http://www.istudiopublisher.com/video-tutorials/

My first project a replacement calling card to be printed on a Standard US Letter Avery 10 up card stock sheet. Details as follows : Printed both sides with background image of our house and the usual text blocks with a decorative frame. The obverse (back ) had a matching frame and a text block giving directions to our house.

I struggled to see how to place the card doc accurately into a 10 up page . Here iStudio support jumped to my aid after I contacted them in UK. Andy replied within minutes with a fully detailed tutorial on using and importing templates other than iStudio templates into iStudio as .pdf ‘s to easily obtain the accurate multi doc layouts for such jobs as making labels and cards.

As soon as I have a new photo of our house to add, the task will be completed and shown here.

Back of the Card

Whilst I have not yet played around with it. IStudio integrates with Lythoglyph’s Mondriianum http://www.lithoglyph.com/mondrianum/ – Download here : http://mondrianum.soft32.com which is a decribed as :

If you’ve never heard of the Adobe Kuler community then prepare to immerse yourself in its wide and technicolored world via Lithoglyph’s Mondrianum.

Adobe Kuler is an online community where you can explore, create, and share color themes. The color themes in Kuler are contributed by users, many of them professional designers or in the creative business so you’re dealing with top notch results. So where does Mondrianum come in?

Well it’s a plug-in that enables Mac applications to get the most out of the Kuler community. Once installed, it acts like a built-in, system-wide color picker which is available on any Mac application that supports this feature of Mac OS X. These include all the big apps such as Apple’s own iWork and iLife suites, Google Sketchup, Adobe Photoshop and other widely used applications such as Coda and CSSEdit.

Mondrianum is a great plug-in for designers and creative professionals looking to access a whole world of unusual and creative colors.

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