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Creating great Publisher page layouts with StudioLink

Using StudioLink to switch Personas with a single click gives you a unique workspace layout containing the tools and panels used by each Persona, giving you limitless combinations of features and effects to make your designs stand out.

In this article, we’ll explore some effects you can produce in the Photo Persona and Designer Persona, which can help you to build some truly eye-catching designs for your pages.

Photo Persona

With the Photo Persona’s photo editing tools and techniques at your disposal, you can correct or enhance the image content in your publication from within the same app.

StudioLink to Photo Persona.

The ability to apply live filters allows you to finetune small details of an image non-destructively. In this instance, a Clarity filter has been added to sharpen things up. Because this is a live filter, you can always come back to it and make further tweaks at a later point without leaving the app.

Photo Persona’s Inpainting Brush Tool makes it easy to remove distracting background elements from an image, so readers’ eyes are immediately drawn to the focal point of the page.

Using the Clone Brush Tool, you can copy pixels from one area of your image to another, using a specified source to clone from. This allows you to replicate image content or repair areas of your original image directly from the app.

Designer Persona

The Designer Persona opens up new graphic design opportunities for your text and page layouts.

StudioLink to Designer Persona.

Vector objects with sharp corners and curves drawn using the Pen Tool can be adjusted with Designer Persona’s Corner Tool, creating smooth rounded edges.

Designer Persona’s Corner Tool.

Designer Persona’s Isometric Panel lets you draw and edit objects across three planes on an isometric grid. Transforming 2D selections and fitting them to a plane makes it easy to rotate and resize content.

Designer Persona’s Isometric panel.

When working in the Isometric Panel, your selection can be adjusted and edited in plane, so your content can be tweaked to fit perfectly on the page. The plane can even be changed for further adjustments.

With Designer Persona’s Appearance Panel, you can apply multiple strokes and fills to any object on the page, creating eye-catching embellishments that really stand out.

Appearance panel used to apply multiple strokes and fills.

Using this in combination with the ability to paste your selected object’s style (via Edit > Paste Style), you can quickly apply the effect you’ve produced to various other shapes and closed curves in your document.

Complex vector designs can also be enhanced with multiple strokes and fills applied.

Appearance panel used to enhance icons.

The ability to set blend modes and opacity on each individual stroke and fill allows for endless combinations of effects. Using the Appearance Panel, you can recolour objects with a second fill, or apply different blend modes to your fills to create a more subtle effect, adjusting vector designs that may have been created externally, so they blend in with your page’s theming and colours.

When adding multiple strokes, you can play around with the widths, caps, joins and gradients of your various strokes to produce some interesting effects.

Adjusting multiple strokes.

Applying multiple strokes with different colours can also make artistic text that has been converted to curves pop out against the page.

Adding multiple strokes to Artistic text.

The ability to adjust the opacity of each of your individual strokes and fills lets you finetune your designs with even more precision.

Multiple strokes with different blend modes.

In this example, the Erase blend mode has been applied to particular strokes, creating a versatile effect that stands out against different backgrounds.

Artistic text against different backgrounds.

Even more varied effects can be produced by gradually reducing both the width and opacity of multiple strokes around a vector object.

Multiple strokes with adjusted opacity.

By giving the strokes a faded look, the text takes centre stage here.

Using the features of all three Personas combined gives you complete control over every little detail on your page, all from within the same app.