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Helpful ideas. Squeaky value.
Helpful ideas. Squeaky value.
Tips on the graphic side of course-building — color, images, icons, characters, and layout.
Look at the best-designed websites in any creative field. Many of them use handwritten fonts alongside clean typography because the combination feels personal. Here's how to bring that same approach into your e-learning courses.
The question I get asked often is "What font are you using?" It's almost always asked when I've used a handwritten font. That's not a coincidence.
Infographics look great because they distill mountains of information down to a few essential points, the same challenge you face every time a subject matter expert hands you a 300-slide deck. Here's what they teach you about focus, color, fonts, and icons in your own courses.
Open a random e-learning course and you'll often find graphics that seem to have landed on screen by accident. Every visual element communicates something to learners, whether you meant it to or not. These foundational design principles help you take control of that message.
I read an article about how Google's designers rethought their products, and it hit close to home. A lot of what tripped them up, sticking with consistent navigation, resisting the urge to fill white space, getting buy-in for change, are the same things we deal with building e-learning. Here's what I took from it.
Every time you build a branched scenario in Storyline, you probably spend minutes hunting for background images. There's a better way. Two methods turn that setup into a one-time task.
Once you've got the 3C model down for your scenario structure, the next challenge is building the visuals. Most people get stuck here because they don't know where to start. Breaking the design into five elements makes it manageable.
Finding the right map for an e-learning course is harder than it looks. Stock images tend to be too generic, and real online maps are too visually busy. Snazzy Maps solves both problems with a simple customization interface.
Most e-learning developers aren't trained graphic designers. But you probably already sense which colors belong in a safety course versus a call center course. That intuition is your visual voice, and it's one of the most practical design tools you have.
You don't need a design degree to build good-looking courses. You need four principles and the discipline to apply them.
Learn how to build a zoomable, interactive course using a single image and Storyline 360's zoom region feature. This tutorial walks you through the full process with a working example and free resources.
Your learners' brains have a built-in limit on how much they can process at once. When you design without that in mind, the course feels hard in the wrong way. Here's what cognitive load is and why it matters for the courses you build.
Good course design isn't about adding more. It's about removing the stuff that gets in the way of learning. Here are a few practical things to keep in mind when cognitive load is working against your learners.
Every visual choice in your course sends a message, whether you planned it or not. This post covers five common design mistakes that quietly undermine the story your course is trying to tell, and how to fix them before learners ever notice.
Every e-learning team eventually debates templates: are they a time-saver or a constraint? The answer is both, depending on where you use them. A smarter approach treats templates as tools for specific parts of the course, not a rigid structure for everything.
