E-Learning Professionals often are not proficient in graphic design. It is not always possible to master all the arts as you already have too many things to take care of. However, if you wish to come up with e-learning courses which are engaging and immersive for your target audience or online learners, it is mandatory to have an understanding and knowledge of the fundamental concepts of graphic design. You must at least, know how effectively to use color, font, and pictures to your advantage. Let us explore three basic graphic design practices and softwares that would be helping e-learning professionals to do their jobs more seamlessly.
Exploit the Incredible Power of Typography
The fonts used by you must focus on the text highlighting the key concepts and ideas. If you use creative fonts, it could make your subject matter come alive and boost learner comprehension. However, creative fonts must necessarily be used in moderation and must be clearly legible. Here are three critical typography tips to remember while chalking out your e-learning course.
- First of all, you must not use more than a couple of font types. If you incorporate a broad spectrum of fonts, it is surely going to clutter the page instead of adding any aesthetic appeal.
- Secondly, according to the font that is being used by you, you need to use the size somewhere between 14 and 16 pixels for the textual body. For sub-headers and headers, you may consider using slightly bigger and bold fonts for capturing the attention of learners.
- Lastly, you must stick to font types which are really easy to read both on mobile devices and desktop. For instance, an ARIAL font seems to be definitely more mobile-friendly as compared to a relatively more elegant font which may not be that legible on a relatively smaller screen.
Color Should Be Used with Care & Caution
Color seems to have the inherent ability to evoke some sort of emotions and would make the learner become more connected to and involved with the precise subject matter. That is primarily the reason why you must use colors with utmost caution for achieving the desired effect. For instance, suppose you want the learners to relax and be comfortable before an important exam, it is best to use blue and avoid red for a soothing effect or to effectively calm their senses. Let us discuss some important tips to use color in graphic designing.
You must focus on using a color scheme that uses just two or three colors. Avoid using more colors as that would make your design look absolutely chaotic. This must be avoided otherwise; it is surely going to be a cause of disruption and distraction for your learners. Moreover, if you are thinking of using colored fonts, it is best to use the same color for the entire body of the text throughout the eLearning course.
In the same manner, sick to choosing one color for the heading and a different color for the subheadings to make them stand out. It is best to use contrasting colors for creating a more intense impact. For instance, you could use a really subdued color like baby pink and pair it perfectly with a dark blue for adding depth and accentuating the design of the e-learning course.’
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Know Your Target Audience
Every element of your e-learning platform design must necessarily cater to the requirements and demands of the learners. Even before starting to chalk out the e-learning course design, it is more important for you to identify and know more about your specific target audience, the learners. You must have a thorough understanding of your target audience. Every block of text, picture, and even color palette you choose must be of some benefit for your target audience. Your intention is to facilitate and enhance the overall learning process.
Your graphic design must serve their learning requirements and effectively help them to gain the knowledge and information they are looking for. The point of the exercise fails if it is not audience-oriented.
Top Graphic Design Software Solutions for Beginners
Let us assume that many e-learning professionals are not professionally qualified graphic designers. However, today people are not just interested in reading the content, they are actually, impressed by the overall appearance and aesthetic appeal of the site. The user is convinced to carry on with your website only if you provide gripping content and stunning pictures. We understand that graphics would be playing a pivotal role in creating your website’s outlook. E-professionals would require robust and easy-to-use graphic design software from time to time for their e-learning courses that would help them in improvising the models, visuals, and even the text.
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If you are a beginner, as far as, graphic designing is concerned; you may use the following graphic design software for infusing a professional look to all your graphics.
Canva
Canva is supposed to be a cloud-based platform which helps you in easily creating professional grade graphic designs. It provides an intuitive and powerful drag-and-drop editor and even gives you easy access to more than a million images, graphics, and fonts for creating any kind of content in a jiffy.
It is mostly used by beginners but even professionals use it for generating marketing materials, book covers, corporate brochures, flyers, presentations, invitations, etc. Canva provides a massive library of templates for helping you in starting your graphic design project. Canva has been designed for project sharing and collaboration. It provides all the necessary tools for basic photo editing and enhancement.
Adobe Photoshop
Photo editing is made incredibly interesting thanks to Photoshop. The automatic options are able to inject life to all your visuals and pictures making your work stand out from the rest and steal all the attention if you are a beginner. With the help of Photoshop, you could seamlessly integrate multiple photos and even get rid of undesirable objects from the picture. It comes with basic features such as channel mixing, perspective correction, and even, clone stamp tool. This software runs on both Mac and Windows and is regarded as one of the top graphic design software just right for beginners because it provides simplified options such as flipping, rotating, straightening, and cropping.
As per Proofhub, “Imagine a program to take your artistic style into a digital world with confidence, a program that compliments your artistic style. Photoshop is an extremely powerful program for creating prints and patterns to be the best you can be in your design world. For designers it has countless options, tools, and settings to open up new opportunities, to create a design that is more authentic with proper guidance.”
Illustrator Graphic Design Software
If you are looking for vector art for creating sketches, logos, typography, icons or some complicated illustrations for mobile or videos, in that case, Illustrator is the best tool for you. You could generate artwork with smooth and seamless alignment simply by drawing some pixel-perfect shapes. Illustrator helps you to do graphic designing in a jiffy. Designing was never so fast before! It has its own plugins that are helpful in transforming a blank page into a striking and aesthetically appealing webpage. This graphic design software is available both for Mac and Windows devices. Both the transform and touch-type tools are simply amazing and easy-to-use.
Conclusion
If you are an e-learning professional, you may consider using these basic graphic design tools for your courses. It always pays and brings rich dividends to learn something new and develop a rounded personality.
