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Shapes and Custom Shape Styles

8th December 2022

Jacob Woolcock

1:57

Shapes and Symbols can really bring a Freeform Board to life – especially once you know how to Copy + Paste Styles and change the Default Style for new shapes. That means you can quickly and easily create great looking graphics that’ll help you better organise your Freeform Boards and hopefully enhance your productivity.

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Next up on my Freeform Board I want to add some shapes and some imagery to make it really stand out a little bit more – particularly my three subheadings.

So on the top toolbar I’ve got this icon with a square and a circle and this brings up shapes just like it does in Keynote, Numbers and Pages.

From here you can swipe along the top toolbar to filter by category, or if you go back to the beginning you can Search.I

‘m going to find a shopping bag for my picture, so I’m going to type in shopping and I’m going to simply tap on that and it will add it onto my page.

Of course I can move this around and resize it just like you would expect.

Let’s add a second icon now for my sightseeing section.

So I’ll press that shapes button again, and this time I’ll search for camera, and when I find a camera that I like I’ll put that on my page too.

Now, I don’t really want these to be the standard blue shapes – in fact I want to make it a bit more funky to match my whole theme.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to recolour this shape.

When I’ve tapped on that shape I can change the fill colour and the outline colour.

I’m going to make the fill colour white and then I’m going to make the outline pink.

I can make the line a little bit thicker just like this, and then I get a really cool stylised icon effect.

Just like with our text in the previous video, if I tap onto here and press the three dots and then go on to Style I can copy that style and then I can paste that onto my next shape.

But there’s actually a better way of doing this – particularly if you’re going to add more shapes to your board in the future…

So when you tap onto those three dots and you go into Style, this time select Save As Insert Style.

That means any more shapes that you insert will automatically inherit this style that you’ve just chosen.

So to test that theory let’s quickly get an airplane to put on my travel subheading.

So again I’ll tap on Shapes, I’ll search for plane and now just like that I’ve got that white with a pink outline airplane.

This board is really coming together nicely!

In the next video we’ll add some photographs and we’ll learn about masking them using shapes.

Click on the link now and I’ll see you there.

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