Remember back when people used to send cards?  They were attractive, personal and really conveyed an idea in a visual way.  Using the Stationary feature that’s built into Mail, you can still send thoughtful correspondence, eye catching invitations and fun photo collages without making a trip to the post office!

Open a New Message in Mail and take a look over on the right side of the tool bar at the top.  There should be two buttons there, Photo Browser and Show Stationary.  If you don’t see the buttons, it just means that your window isn’t opened wide enough to see them; look for the two little arrows pointing right and click on them.  Click on Show Stationary.

You’ll notice that a bar opens just above the message section of the screen that shows 5 images.  These are the choices we have for how we want our email to look.  Don’t get discouraged that there are only 5, if you look on the left side of that bar,  you’ll notice that we’re only looking at Birthday stationary right now.  Click on each of the topics to discover all the choices you’ve got.  When you’ve checked them all out, choose on Announcements, and then select Dinner.  By selecting one of the Stationary examples in the bar, the message field gets formatted to match.  Now all we have to do is fill in the placeholder items and we’ll have a beautiful looking email to send to our friends.  To practice, let’s make an invitation for an afternoon get-together for 3:00 on Saturday.

First, we need to replace the photo.  Sure these people are good-looking, but I don’t know them and would rather have some of my attractive friends there.  Use the Photo Browser to find the perfect photo in your iPhoto library and drag it right on top of the existing photo.  Mail does all the cropping and rotation for you so that it fits into the same space.

Next, “Thanks for dining with us.”  Well we haven’t dined yet, so we need to change this headline.  Just click on the sentence, highlight the text and then type in your message.  For a quick way to select all text at the same time, triple click on any of the words in the sentence, then just start typing.

Now we’ve got some jibberish that looks like Latin.  Its actually type setter’s placeholder text.  Again, just highlight that text (triple click!) and type in your own message.

Now all that’s left to be done is to address the email and give it a subject and its ready to send!

If you really like using Stationary in Mail, you might quickly realize that there only a limited number of designs to choose from.  Equinux makes a equinux Stationery Pack 2 to add on to Mail to give you hundreds of new options for customizing your email using Stationary.

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