eLA Podcast ?? | Ep. 8 | Design for Non-Designers (Part 1/3)

< Episode 7 ... Episode 9 [Coming soon] >

Find Our Podcast Here:

?? SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/theelearningalchemist

?? Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyYiquFWjdp8zQTi9cUlK8w

?? Podcast apps:

     ? Apple Podcasts - https://ow.ly/OVhR30ms3E9

     ? Google Podcasts - https://ow.ly/zB2Q30ms3Do

     ? Spotify - https://ow.ly/HF2Z30mxfid  

     ? Pocket Casts - https://ow.ly/PmUK30ms3DK

     ? Stitcher - https://ow.ly/n6xT30ms3CQ

     ? Podbean - https://ow.ly/7dRU30ms3Cg

     ? RadioPublic - https://ow.ly/DzKE30ms3Da

Enhanced Transcript

Welcome to the eLearning Alchemist podcast, I’m your host Clint Clarkson and in this episode we’ll discuss graphic design for eLearning and PPT presentations. Alright, so this is going to be tricky. We’re going to talk about something that is entirely visual, without any visuals... So, this is not really the right medium for this topic, but we’re going to do it anyways because sometimes you have to meet learners where they’re at. Which in your case might be on your drive to work, on the train into the city, on a flight, or literally just about anywhere else. However, if you do have more time, look for the Enhanced Transcript of this episode on my LinkedIn profile, where I’ll include images, screencasts and downloads to help you up your visual design game. My profile can be found at linkedin.com/in/ClintClarkson.

Over the years I’ve heard a lot of L&D professionals (and anyone designing a presentation really) question the virtues of spending time on visual design.

“Isn’t the content what this is all about?” they ask.

“Shouldn’t we be more worried about how the learning is instructionally designed?”

These are great questions. And, the answer to both is “Yes!” It is about the content, how the content is presented, if the learner learns, and if they perform back on the job. Visual design doesn’t supersede these things.

BUT! You should still care about visual design!

Look, the design of a course or presentation sends an immediate message to the audience about the quality of the content. The message is either – this is high-quality and professional, or this looks like an amateur did it and it’s probably going to suck. This message gets sent before you even say a word. So, your content might be exactly on-point and highly-relevant to the audience. The interactions you’ve designed may be perfect for delivering the content in a way that helps learners learn. And, you may have spent hours-upon-hours preparing to present or putting your course through user acceptance testing. But, if the design sucks, that’s the first message you send to your audience and you’ll be working from behind, before you even start.

And it goes further… visual design can aid the learning! If you know how:

• how screen placement relates to eye tracking,
• how contrast draws attention,
• how proximity creates relationships, or
• how alignment makes a screen look composed or disjointed.

If you know these things you can use them to your advantage to improve the quality of your presentation or course.

Your learners may know not what makes good visual design, but they know it when they see it and the react differently to good design than they do to bad design.

This is still a podcast though, so we’re constrained by time; so, we need to get on with it. Frankly, there’s not enough time in just one episode to cover everything we should cover on this topic, so we’ll break this into 3 episodes. Yes, three! There’s that much to talk about.

In this first episode, Part 1, we’ll get into a couple of design building block:

• We’ll start with grids. There is, in my opinion, absolutely nothing more important than having a grid to design from. You can mess up a lot of other things and still have a decent feeling design if it’s built on a solid grid.
• Then we’ll dive into backgrounds. Backgrounds are a simple enough design element, but they can definitely be done wrong. We’ll talk about some different background styles and cover a few key ideas to help you select a background.

In Part 2, we’ll shift gears into some important design elements:

• We’ll start with fonts. We won’t spend a lot of time on them, but we should discuss font combinations and where you can find some great ones.
• We’ll also get into colour. Colour theory and the use of colour can be extremely difficult if it’s a topic you’re not familiar with.

For many presenters and eLearning designers, your colour palette is decided for you and how you use those colours will be your main consideration. If you’re not restricted by brand guidelines or you aren’t provided “accent colours” you’ll want to know about a few great tools for creating a colour palette.

In Part 3, we’ll start putting things together with design techniques.

• In this episode we’ll talk about CRAP (C, R, A, P). This is a now famous acronym created by Robin Williams (not the actor) in his book The Non-Designer’s Design Book. CRAP stands for Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity, which make up the four pillars of great design and they’re all easy to apply. So, in other words, good design is CRAP.

So, we’ve got a lot to cover. We better get on with it. Starting with...

Grids

Grids are a vital tool for making your course look “designed.” Vanseo designs has a great blog post about the value of grids. They say that Grids create these four things:

1. Clarity/Order — Grids bring order to a layout making it easier for [learners] to navigate through information.
2. Efficiency — Grids allow designers to quickly add elements to a layout because many layout decisions are addressed [by] the grid structure.
3. Economy — Grids make it easier for other designers to work and collaborate on the design as they provide a plan for where to place elements.
4. Consistency/Harmony — Grids lead to consistency in the layout across [slides] and create structural harmony in the design.

So, let’s discuss the elements of a grid and then look at how to create your own.

Design grids are made up of rows and columns. Just think of an Excel spreadsheet… that’s basically a grid. But, grids for visual design contain some additional elements.

Margins

First is the margin. You don’t want your text, containers, icons, and other graphical elements flush against the sides of your screen. They need space to “breath” and be seen. Exceptions to this guideline occur with photos, banners, and containers. For example:

• If you have a full-screen or half-screen photo, you will generally want it to extend right to the edge of the slide.
• The same goes for full-width or full-height banners, it’s okay if the extend right to the edge of the screen.

A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself, is this element effectively becoming part of the background. Backgrounds should extend right to the edge of the slide, so if a container, photo, or banner is taking on the role of background, you can absolutely extend it right to the edge.

Other than these exceptions, you want to have a margin around your entire slide that is virtually unbreakable – meaning that nothing goes outside the margin. Your margin may be visible, as in you actually have a line drawn where your margin is. But, it’s more frequently invisible. An invisible margin is “seen” by the human eye created by objects placed against it and because virtually nothing is every place in that area.

Chances are that you use margins already, whether your conscious that you’re doing it or not. The key with margins is to make sure they are consistent throughout your design. The margin doesn’t need to be consistent on all sides of the slide. If you’re required to include closed-captioning in your course, you’re likely going to create a larger margin at the bottom of the slide.

If you’re a non-designer though, the simplest approach is to create a consistent margin around the entire slide.

Gutters

The next element you want to be familiar with are gutters. Gutters are space between rows or columns. If you imagine a row or column of three blue text containers, chance are they aren’t flush against each other. They are likely separated by a small bit of space, hopefully distributed evenly, which clearly indicates that they are different objects. If your course is built on a grid, that space is your gutter.

Gutters should be consistent for both your columns and your rows to maintain visual consistency. So, if the gutters between your rows is 10 pixels, you should also have a 10 pixel gutter between your columns. Gutters, unlike margins, are violated all the time. Gutters are used to create space between objects. So, if the objects aren’t close to each other, you can fill up the gutter space.

You Can Break the Grid

There are more elements to grids than rows, columns, margins, and gutters, but for a non-designer, these will take you a long way. There are a variety of different types of grids used for websites, print layouts, books, and more, but for slide design, the modular grid created by using columns and rows works perfectly.

An important note on grids is that once you’ve made them, you can break them! Sometimes you want to do something that violates the grid and that’s okay! Using a grid will create visual consistency and give your course a “designed” feel, but sometimes the grid just doesn’t work for what you need to do. Once you know your grid, then you can break it purposefully.

Grid Math

My Favorite Grid

The grid I use most frequently when designing slides is 12 columns, by 8 rows and set on a slide that is 1,146 pixels, by 650 pixels. There’s a reason for all these numbers.

• First, 12 columns is a great choice because it allows you to easily divide your screen into halves, 3rds, quarters, or sixths. So, a 12-column grid gives you a lot of flexibility. And, if you need fifths, you just break the grid – you’re allowed after all.

Image Source

• With 12 columns in place, I add 8 rows. Why 8 rows? First, it creates nearly square modules in your grid, which is a nice shape to work with. Second, horizontal divides aren’t used as frequently, particularly for widescreen, where anything beyond quarter divides become very narrow strips. But, if you want narrow horizontal strips, just break the grid.
• Finally, that 1146 pixels by 650 pixels pixels. This is a custom size, but it’s virtually a 16:9 aspect ratio. The reason for the custom size is that it allows me to create the 12-column, 8-row grid, with equal margins and gutters without a pixel to spare. If we stick with the perfect 16:9 ratio of 1152x648 , either your margins aren’t equal, or you need to compensate somewhere in your grid, which makes sizing and aligning objects more difficult later.

I’ll include a link to a Storyline file that includes this exact grid and a screen cast that shows you how to create your own grid, if you want to use different margin, or gutter sizes for example.

• Storyline 12x8 Grid Download
• PPT 12x8 Grid Download

Notes About Grids in PPT and Storyline (Only in this Enhance Trascript)

• Building grids can be a bit more difficult in PPT because PPT uses your system measurement settings (likely centimeters or inches) and not pixels. You can use an online measurement converter like Ninja Units to make this conversion.
• PPT does have a feature that's really helpful - you can change the colour of guidelines when you build your grid. You can't do this in Articulate Storyline.
• Articulate Storylien allows you to lock your guidelines! This is such a huge help. Unfortunately, this option doesn't exist in PPT.

Using the Grid

Okay, so you’ve got this grid, there’s a whole bunch of vertical and horizontal lines on your screen. What do you do know?

If you haven’t used a grid before, the first thing to do is to start thinking of your on-screen content in “blocks.” A photo is a block, a container is a block, a text box is a block, even an icon is a block. This is helpful for you, but it’s also helpful for your clients if you’re creating “wire frames” for them.

Blocks can be any size or shape that fit within the grid. For example: they could be 3 columns by 2 rows columns, or they could be 1 column by 8 rows. In fact, you could put both of those sizes on screen, side-by-side, and they’d still look like they “fit” together if their built on the grid.

Keep in mind that the human eye loves equal and complimentary proportions. If you want your slide to have a polished, unified feel, keep your blocks related in size. For example: You could layout 3 photos on-screen at 6 columns by 4 rows (which is exactly ? the screen size on our 12x8 grid) grid, with two photos beneath it that are 3 columns by 4 rows (which is 1/8th the screen size on our grid) . This could simply be stylistic, or it could be to draw more attention to the larger photo.

If you want to create a slide that is a bit more frenetic, you could include a variety of different sized blocks. If you’ve ever seen a magazine article with a bunch of photos that are seemingly just plopped all over the page, and thought to yourself, that looks so random, but it looks so perfect. How do they do that? The answer: it's a grid.

Image Source

There’s a great example of how grids are used, even to create imagery that is supposed to look rugged and unpolished, in one of the movie posters for Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince. I’ll include a screen cast explaining the grid as well as a photo with all of the grid lines so you can have a look.

Image Source: I've seen a grid on this poster before but couldn't locate the original image. I've recreated and expanded on that original image; however, if anyone knows where I can find the original image please put it in the comments and I'll add a reference.

Quick Tip

A quick tip about modular grids. The “blocks” (again a block is really anything you put on screen) should fill the modules, but not the gutters. For example: If you creates a 1 column by 2 row block – the 1 column should be only the width of that column and not include the gutter on either side. The 2 rows should include both rows and the gutter between them, but not the gutters above or below them.

Well, we just spent a lot of time talking about grids, which should emphasis the significant importance of them. If you want your PPTs and eLearning designs to look polished and professional start using a grid template. I’ll leave links to downloadable grids for PPTs and Articulate Storyline 360 in the description.

Backgrounds

Alright, let’s move on to what lies behind the grid, backgrounds! Your background is a crucial element of your course design, but with a lot of presentations and courses, the background feels like an after thought (if it was given any thought at all).

For those of you who are less enthusiastic about design, you might be thinking “What’s the point of your background anyway?” Do you really need to spend much time on them?

Backgrounds play a couple of important roles in your design.

First, they help bring your course design “theme” together. For example:

• A metropolis city in the background might send a message of business, professionalism and power.
• Conversely, a country meadow background might send a message of calmness, connection, and positivity.

Each of these backgrounds would be appropriate for different courses. If they are put in the wrong course, they’ll feel out of place and send a message that conflicts with the material.

Remember that your design is telling a story and your background should be consistent with that story.

The second role backgrounds play is to reduce visual strain. Solid white backgrounds with black text are high-contrast and stark to the eye. Backgrounds can subtly and discretely soften the intensity of the slide and make your design look complete.

Now, there are numerous different background styles that are easy to apply, but first, lets highlight a couple of major mistakes non-designers make when it comes to backgrounds.

1. The first mistake is that they don’t use any background at all, or more precisely, the background is just solid white. There may be occasions where a solid white background is appropriate, but there aren’t many. A solid white background is stark and too closely resembling all those horrible presentations and eLearning modules your people have been forced to sit through. They also do nothing to support the theme of your project. Another way to say it is, no design is bad design.
2. The second mistake is selecting a background that is distracting. The background should be exactly that, a background. It shouldn’t distract from the content, make text hard to read, or make it difficult to understand the screen layout. Rainbows and coloured smoke look cool as standalone pictures, but they’re super distracting when content is put on top of them.

So, what should you do with your background? Let’s work through a series of background ideas, moving from the most simple to a bit more complex (but still easy enough for anyone to use).

Solid Colours

A flat colour background isn’t a totally unreasonable option. It’s not usually my choice, but if your really short on time or are uncomfortable with any of the other options here, you can use a solid colour.

The colour you choose should be consistent with the rest of your them, but it’s likely going to be a lot lighter. One way to create the effect easily is to create a solid background fill and simply increase the transparency. By increasing the transparency, you add white to the background colour and soften its appearance.

Your organizations colour palette may also include some subtle colours, like a soft grey or beige, that can be used for a background.

In this episode, I’m not going to get into dark themes, where you would use a dark background, because these designs would be inconsistent with most corporate branding guidelines. But, if you’re planning a dark theme, make sure you choose a colour that text will show up on easily.

Gradient backgrounds

A step up in design difficulty from solid colours is gradients. A gradient is two or more colours that blend together seamlessly. When you look at the sky just after sunset and there's all those pinks and purples and oranges and blues all subtly blending into each other and then into the night sky above – that’s a gradient.

Gradients can be extremely complicated or very simple, but if you’re not used to working with gradients, they can be challenging. A lot of non-Designers shy away from gradients, because they’re not sure how to use them – I’ve certainly been in that spot. Luckily, you can find lots of free gradients online.

You can find gradients by:

• Search “Color Gradient” on Google. If you want to use a Google image as a direct download, make sure you have the correct usage rights selected.
• Alternatively, you can also find a gradient you like and re-create it using the gradient tool and colour picker in PPT or Storyline. This trick can be particularly useful if you need to create a gradient that includes your corporate colours. Just find something similar and then sub in your corporate colour.
• Some free stock graphic sites like www.pixabay.com have oodles of gradient backgrounds to choose from.
• If you have access to a paid stock site like Shutterstock, you’ll have access to more gradients than you could ever search through and will need to narrow your search by adding a colour to the search inquiry. You can also recreate these gradients using the gradient and colour picker tools.
• Another great way to find gradients is on free stock photo sites like www.Unsplash.com. Yes, I did just say photo sites. If you search for gradients, you’ll get all kinds of photos with gradients that appear naturally in the world, such as the sunset I mentioned earlier. These types of gradients will fit really well with designs that are more natural or out-doors based, such as if you worked for a wilderness supply company. Just crop the non-gradient parts of the image out and your good to go.

A subtle variation on the gradient is the vignette. When you see a black or white halo around the outside of an image, that’s a vignette. Vignette’s can be evenly distributed around a photo or be more heavily weighted to the top, bottom, or sides. Vignette’s look cool in photographs, but I’m not a big fan of them for slide design. The traditional vignette really puts a lot of focus on the center of the slide, which isn’t appropriate for most slides.

Textured Backgrounds

To this point, all we’ve really talked about are colours. Now, let’s take it up a notch now with textures. Textures can be rough and obvious, like concrete, or soft and subtle like a piece of paper or painted wall. They can also be photographic or graphical.

Just as with gradient, you can find textures on Google, free stock sites, paid stock sites, and even around your house. How much do you like your carpet? Take a picture of it and drop it in the background. It probably won’t look right, but you’ve got some quick and easy tools at your disposal to adjust them.

Option 1: Convert the image to black and white in PPT or Storyline, then put a transparent container with your choice of colour over top. This approach is going to “wash-out” the texture, making it subtler, which may be what you need. You can also adjust the transparency of the image to maintain a deeper colour.

Option 2: Is to use the re-colour tool in PPT or Storyline. This will get you a more vibrant colour, and you can use the colour picker tool to match it to your company or clients corporate colours.

Which ever option you choose, I recommend using the “Save as Picture” option to save the image as a jpeg and then re-insert it into the file. I do this because when you use the re-colour tools, the image maintains all of its original properties, which unnecessarily increases your file size.

If you work in an organization that is hyper sensitive about every photo and design decision, textures can be a simple way to get around just having a flat background.

Abstract Backgrounds

Abstract backgrounds are a great alternative to textures. If you’re theme is high-tech an abstract circuit board background could be a perfect design addition. If you’re theme is related to medicine, an abstract background with cell structures or the human genome might work well.

You can also look for abstract backgrounds based on shapes or colours. Try search “geometric background” or “blue abstract background” into Google or your favourite stock sites.

Abstract backgrounds are a great choice because they’re a bit more artistic than textured backgrounds, but they still tend to “settle in” to the background and won’t distract the learner. Just make sure you don’t pick something that is visually overwhelming.

Monochrome Images

One of my personal favourite background styles is the monochromatic image. Monochromatic simply means that only one colour is present, but at different intensities. What we often call black and white or grayscale images are just gray monochromatic images. So, that grayscale image, could also have a scale or red or blue, teal or lavender.

The re-colour feature in PPT and Storyline will let you create a monochromatic image out of anything. Just choose the re-colour option and then increase the images transparency to “soften” the background to a point that it no longer competes with your on-screen elements.

Be careful with monochromatic images though if you’ll have a lot of other images in your course. “Stacked” images can be visually jarring, they often just don't work together. You may choose to have a different background for slides that use images and those that do not.

Blurred Images

The last background type to consider is blurred images. Blurred images create a great resting place for your content. If you work in manufacturing, a blurred background of your production facility would make an awesome background. If you work in an industry like banking, you’ll probably need to use a stock photo, but you’ll be able to find lots of blurred options on Google, as well as free and paid stock sites.

If you have an image and want to “blur it out,” PPT has an easy to use blur effect that can be applied to any image. It also gives you control of the intensity of the blur. You can blur the image to the point that it is no longer recognizable (making it abstract), or you can leave enough detail, so the learner knows what scene your presenting. If you create a blurred image in PPT and need to use it in Storyline, just use the “Save as Picture” feature and then import it into storyline.

Choose the Right Images

If you’re using images, whether monochromatic or blurred, you can save yourself a lot of heart ache by choosing the right images. Probably the most important consideration is going to be the amount of contrast that appears in the image. For example: A sun setting behind a mountain might be a beautiful picture, but it’ll be tough to make it work as a monochromatic image, because the mountains will be very dark and sun will be very bright. As result, to get a consistent overall colour to the background, you’ll need to add a lot of transparency, probably to the point where the only thing you can really see anymore is the mountains. This might be workable, but an image that has less contrast throughout it will be easier to work with in general.

Here's an example of an image that has high contrast. The sun in the background is very bright, while the silhouette of the family is very dark.

• Top Left: This is the original image. It has too much contrast to be used as a background.
• Top Right: This image is probably usable, but only because the sun is now unnoticeable.
• Bottom Left: This image maintains the sun and silhouettes and as result wouldn't make a good background.
• Bottom Right: This dark version would also be workable, but only because the sun and silhouettes are virtually undetectable.

Quick Tip

Before we wrap this up here's one last quick tip about using backgrounds: Always add your backgrounds to your master slides.

The only exception to this is if you're using a different background on virtually every slide. But, you could have 4 or 5 different backgrounds setup in your master slides and you can choose them quickly for the slide you're working on.

This will prevent them from being accidentally moved around, make moving other objects easier (because you won’t accidentally select the background) and will reduce file size, especially if you’re using a high-resolution photo.

Wrap Up

Alright folks, this has been a long episode so let’s wrap it up - here is a rapid-fire recap for your pleasure:

1. The grid is a powerful design tool that can help you design great looking courses even if you’re not a designer. Grids are easy to create and follow and will bring clarity, consistency, efficiency, and harmony to your design project.
2. There are a lot of different types of background options. Don’t just stick with a stark white background because you’re not sure what to do. Use a solid colour, a gradient, a texture, something abstract, or a monochromatic or blurred photo. All these options require little design skill. Just make sure the option you choose is consistent with the rest of your theme.

What do you think? Do you think a grid will help improve your design? Or, is it a waste of time that could be used elsewhere? What about backgrounds? Is there another background style that I should have mentioned here? Or, do you think slides shouldn’t have backgrounds at all? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Put them in the comments section or email me at [email protected].

That’s all for today folks, thank you so much for listening. I hope you’ll listen again next week when we continue this design discussion with Part 2 of 3, where we’ll delve into fonts and colours.

Take care until then,

CC

Clint Clarkson, CTDP  is just another victim who accidentally stumbled down the rabbit hole of corporate learning and development. He is the Founder & Managing Partner of eLearning Alchemy, a custom eLearning development firm. While he’s known for being upbeat, positive, and enthusiastic, Clint is still easily offended by comic-sans, bullet points, and the excessive use of buzzwords. Connect with Clint on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.