I often tell people that, even though I work for an advertising agency, I am not a designer. Instead, I work with a team of talented individuals dedicated to creating beautiful designs for our clients, using sophisticated tools such as Quark XPress.

But sometimes, usually for Manic Mommies, I am forced to put my designer hat on to create materials (postcards, media kits, online graphics). In the past, I would use Quark because I liked it’s flexibility, and because it was loaded onto my laptop. The problem is, although Quark is a very powerful design tool, it is a blank slate which gives a true designer room to create anything.

And, as I just stated, I am not designer.

What I needed was an easy-to-use program, that gave me the flexibility of Quark, but also came loaded with templates that matched the Manic Mommies aesthetic. Oh, and it couldn’t cost me an arm and a leg (Quark retails for $799 – a little out of reach for most consumers).

I tried designing a couple of items in Microsoft Word, which does have some ready made templates for newsletters and brochures, but I didn’t like the designs and I found the program was a bit rigid when I wanted flexibility to adjust items within the document.

Then I decided to give Pages from Apple a try, and immediately found what I was looking for. Part of iWork ’08, Pages is a word processing program that can be used just like Word, but also includes a variety of pre-designed templates for newsletters, signs, brochures and postcard (just to name a few).

For the Manic Mommies Escape ’08 Media Kit, I selected one of the newsletter templates (Sailing), then customized it using graphics I had on file, plus a cruise graphic I purchased from iStockPhoto.com. iWork has templates not just for the cover, but for the other types of pages you might need in a newsletter, all using the same theme to ensure consistency.

My one issue with iWork (actually, with all the programs I use on the Mac) is with exporting PDFs. The PDFs generated by the built-in driver are enormous, generally much too big for e-mailing or posting to our web site. I’ve tried a couple ways to reduce the file size, but I found my best bet was to use my Adobe Acrobat driver at work, rather than the driver that came with the computer.

In addition to Pages, iWork comes with Numbers, an Excel-type program, and Keynote, a very slick presentation program that I’ve started using at work, all for $79 (or $99 for a family pack which can be used on up to 5 computers in one household). Not a bad deal as far as I’m concerned!

Have you been tapped as the designer for your family, company or non-profit organization? What program do you use? Have you tried iWork and Pages?