Section by Section: The amazing flexibility of Artisan's text columns with images section

In addition to the new contact form section, Out of the Sandbox’s new Shopify theme, Artisan, also includes one of the most flexible sections yet — text columns with images.

Despite its rather ordinary sounding name, this section is just one of Artisan’s secret weapons that can be used for a wide variety of purposes.

The section is also included in Turbo, though with slightly different options. 

Within each text columns with image section, you can add one to five blocks, each of which represents one of the columns in the section.

Each column, or block, can feature any or all of the following:

• Image, with a circle-crop option 
• Heading, with regular or large size options
• Rich text with formatting capabilities, and alignment options
• Link-style button
• Border, with boxed or quote style options

Additional elements are available for this text columns section as a whole, allowing you to add any of the following:

• Preheading text: An optional smaller blurb of text
• Heading: A larger, eye-catching label for the entire section
• Shapes: A variety of shape options that appears behind the content

A myriad of uses

The flexibility of this section is hard to overstate — it allows you to create an almost unlimited combination of looks for a variety of purposes.

Editorial style

Use a combination of text columns and images to create a magazine-style layout that makes information easier to scan and digest. Try varying the heading size, border styles and image aspect ratios (square, vertical or other shapes) to achieve different looks:

Featured services and steps

A typical layout to showcase info in this section would be 3 or 4 columns, each with an image at the top, followed by text, as we did in our Phoenix demo store. Try varying the image crop and make use of the background shapes option for this section too, as in the third example:

Event listings and calendar style

This section could also be used to configure an event list or calendar of sorts, similar to what we've done in our Barcelona demo store. You don't even necessarily need to include any images, as the "Bakery shop" sample demonstrates below: 

Promote your blog

Consider using this section as an alternative way to showcase blog content on your homepage. In this example, hand-picked blog posts are listed in the text columns under three distinct categories. Note that this type of layout does require you to link to blog posts manually, but this can actually give you more flexibility to pick which posts are spotlighted — and combine content from multiple blogs or pages.

More ideas for inspiration