nothing to see here!
Description
Organising your thoughts and ideas in Freeform is made incredibly easy with a wide selection of customisable connecting lines, arrows and links. These can be completely customised to make them thicker, thinner, dotted, dashed, straight, curved, arrow-headed or pretty much anything else! But what’s more is that these connecting lines can dynamically move and adapt as the content on your Freeform Board changes. In this short and easy-to-follow tutorial I’ll show you exactly how they all work!
Transcript
All right, so now it’s time to start connecting some of our objects together on our Freeform Board by using some arrows and some connectors.
To start using these we’re going to press that Shapes button from the previous video, and at the top there are three different types of lines that we can use in Freeform.
Now the first two behave very similarly, but the third one is quite interesting – we’ll come to that in a moment.
For now though let’s click onto this and then we can position it on our page.
On my little pill shaped menu bar I have a couple of options to customise the line I’ve just created.
For example I can make the line itself thicker or thinner, I can make it dotted or dashed, and I can change the color.
But excitingly I can also change what happens at the beginning and the end of my line.
That means I can make a double ended arrow, I can have a circle on one side and the line on the other – whatever I want to do I can customise it here.
And as soon as I’ve got it looking great I can use the dots at each end to position it on my page.
This is all looking brilliant until I move one of those two objects…
With that sticky note moved you realise the problem with this line is that it’s actually attached to the page itself, not the objects I’m working with.
So what I’m going to do is go back to my Shapes toolbar and this time I’ll go for that third option of the curved line.
Rather than customising the whole line again I’ll simply right click on the other line, I’ll Copy the Style and I’ll Paste it on my new line.
I’m gonna get rid of the two circles and make it just turn to an arrow instead, so I’ll change the start on the end symbols.
And with this line I can also choose if I want it to be a curved line, a kind of right angled line, or a straight line.
I’m going to go for the curved lines because I think it looks quite nice.
Then I can use the dots at either end to position it on my page.
But the difference here is that when I move one of those dots it will kind of clip into place and join onto the other object on the page.
Already you then start seeing the magic of this type of line, because as soon as I move that shopping bag the line itself will automatically follow it around my board – no matter how far I move it.
I can even use the green dot in the middle to change the curvature of the line if I wanted to.
I’m going to right click on this and Duplicate it a few times and connect my airplane and my camera to my central image as well.
And now if I were to move my middle picture, the other three lines will all move automatically for me just like you expect them to.
By the way if you’re finding this series helpful then please do consider Subscribing to my YouTube channel down below.
As well as having all these videos about Freeform I’ve also got tons of other tips there to help you make the most of your Mac – and there are more being added all the time!
In the next video we’re going to have a look at how we can import Documents, Websites and other rich media onto our Freeform Board- so I’ll see you there in a moment.
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