It’s common that when getting to a new web service or starting a new application you see some sort of instructions or start screen. Basically, the screen freezes your interaction with the site until you’re oriented and then lets you continue. Some force the interaction and others allow you to opt-out.

Those are not much different than the gate screens I’ve written about in the past (with free downloads). The gate screen sort of does the same thing. It stops your progress, provides instructions, and lets you continue.

Examples of Start Screens

Here are some examples of different instruction screens I’ve seen online. I’m sure you’ve seen something similar.

How to Create an Interactive Start Screen

Today I’ll walk through the process of creating an interactive start screen. Below I highlight the main considerations and you can watch the video tutorial to get the details.

• Is the screen mandatory or can the user click away at any time? I prefer the freedom to leave, however, there may be times where it’s important the person is exposed to all of the instructions. Sometimes people tend to skip out and they may benefit from not doing so, especially when it comes to matters of compliance training.
• Does the instruction only move forward or does it go backward, as well? Probably more a matter of preference, but if they can go back make sure you build the navigation to work properly. You’ll also notice that one of the images above offers a single “continue” button thus limiting it to forward movement only.
• Do you need the progress dots? Many of those instruction screens have dots. They’re good for progress indicators. You’ll notice that some of the screens display numbers or timelines. If you do use dots, are they clickable? Do they need to be?
• How are the instructions displayed? Are they on cards, which seems to be the most common. Or are they displayed fullscreen? Fullscreen gives you more real estate. Cards are usually laid over the main screen with some sort of lightbox design.
• Is the content animated? There are some nice effects you can create with entrance and exit animations. But sometimes when building these types of screens, the time it takes to make them look right, may not be worth the value you get.
• How do the instructions end? Some disable the navigation buttons and others offer a “get started button.” The main consideration is what is the next step? If they need to continue, make that clear. Or if all they need is to close the screen, then make that clear, as well.

How-to Tutorial

Here’s a tutorial where I build a quick prototype and discuss some of the considerations and approaches you can take building an interactive start screen.

Click here to view the tutorial.

There are a lot more considerations, but those are a good start. And when you actually start to build the screens for your course, you’ll find there are many different ways to do so.

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I build a lot of templates and shareable files, so I often use system fonts. I do this so I don’t need to worry about fonts not being installed on the other person’s computer. Most of the time I stick with Open Sans. It’s a nice clean font family that has plenty of options. And it’s one people usually have.

When it comes to working with fonts, I’m not a designer, so I like to keep it simple. I usually look for a title, body, and maybe an extra one for emphasis. So I may have a style guide that looks like this:

However, sometimes system fonts can get a little boring. And besides, we all have certain fonts that we really like, that is until they’re overused…like papyrus. Here are (were) some of my favorite go-to fonts. They’re ones I actually know the names of and can locate on my computer.

• I like Skippy Sharp for handwriting. But it has gotten a bit old and a lot of people use it now. They need to make a Skippier Sharper font.
• I use Action Man for comic style modules. But I may go back to the retro Comic Sans which is like the Stranger Things of fonts.
• I like the slab fonts for headlines. Rockwell is a nice one. But again, it’s starting to get overused.
• I used to like Pacifico, until others found it, too. Now my fonts aren’t making me special. I’m an iPhone 7 in an iPhone X world.
• Franklin Gothic is a nice clean font family. As is Helvetica and the many knockoffs.

Today, I was thinking about how many of us have our favorite fonts that we like to use. In fact, if I see a project from someone on our team, I can usually guess who build it by the fonts used in the module.

When I’m in a pinch, I always know I can go with Rockwell for a title, the Open Sans family for body/emphasis, and Skippy Sharp for an accent.

So I was wondering what you use:

• What’s your favorite title font?
• What’s your favorite font combination?
• What’s your favorite handwritten font?
• What do you do to add emphasis to the text? Do you use a new font, bold, or recolor?

Feel free to share what you use in the comments.

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E-learning is a mostly visual medium which means a lot of what we communicate in our courses comes through how they’re structured visually. The challenge is that graphic design and visual communication are their own fields and it’s hard enough to be a good instructional designer let alone a good graphic artist.

I get the privilege of reviewing a lot of courses and understand that many people struggle with the visual part of the course. So in this post, we’ll review some common visual design mistakes that are easily fixed. They won’t make you into a graphic artist, but they should help make your course design a little tighter.

Visual Design Mistake 1: Images are Scrunched & Not Scaled

This is one of the most common mistakes and easily fixed. An image is inserted and then to make it fit or move it, it gets moved from the top or side anchors on the bounding box. This scrunches the image and makes it look a little off.

The fix is to drag it from the corner to scale it and preserve its aspect ratio. It most apps, you hold the SHIFT key and drag to keep it locked while you scale it up or down.

Visual Design Mistake 2: Not Sure Where to Focus

This is a general issue and I’ll address more specific fixes below. Essentially the eye moves across the screen in a pattern. Without a structured design, we tend to scan in a Z pattern. There are some things that disrupt the pattern like colors, size, whitespace, and an object’s relationship to another. That means we can help control eye movement. However, many times the course screens seem to just have a hodge-podge of things on it with lots of conflicting attempts to draw the eye’s attention.

Here are two good fixes:

• Learn more about basic design ideas like the CRAP (contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity). I strongly recommend the book, The Non-Designer’s Design Book. It’s a must-have for the novice.
• Everything on the screen should be there for a reason. I call this intentional design. If doesn’t help meet your objective, it probably doesn’t need to be there.

Visual Design Mistake 3: Inconsistent Visual Style

Ever take a course where each slide or screen looks different than the other? This usually happens because the developer is building slide to slide. I see this all the time in workshops. What happens is that they make design decisions at the slide level as they work. This leads to spending too much time reviewing every font installed on the computer looking for just the right one. Or going a stock photo site and trying to come up with ideas.

Other elements of visual inconsistency are:

• Too many fonts with no rationale for switching from one to the other.
• Decorative images used to fill empty space rather than contributing to communication.
• Fitting all of the content on the screen so there’s no white space.
• NASCAR-like branding in the course.

Again, I’ll reference intentional design and the need to have a plan around what will and won’t be on the screen. One easy solution is to do some sort of design mapping like the one David Anderson shares. It helps you consider the visual elements of your courses and make design decisions before you start building. Once you’ve narrowed down your intent you should put together a simple style guide. You’ll save time and have visual consistency.

Visual Design Mistake 4: No Visual Hierarchy

This issue relates to the mistake above. If everything on the screen looks equal it’s hard to scan the content and even more difficult to figure out what fits where.

Having a visual hierarchy fixes this. It allows you to chunk content and makes it easier to discern context. The easiest thing is to create a simple style guide with headings, sub-headings, and body text.

Visual Design Mistake 5: Alignment Looks Sloppy & Out of Whack

There are some courses where the margins are all different widths and objects aren’t aligned properly. This makes the course look sloppy and a little out of balance or off kilter. It’s like walking into the room where the furniture doesn’t seem to be staged right and the pictures are crooked. You may not be a home decorator, but you definitely can tell when it doesn’t look right. The same goes with a visual design that is out of balance. It just doesn’t look right. And it may make it bit more challenging to understand the course content.

This is easy to fix:

• Have consistent margins.
• Align objects, left justified is the most common. If you switch the justification, have a reason why.
• Extra space between groups helps communicate that they’re grouped.
• A lot of people use a grid system to keep onscreen objects aligned.

Those are common design mistakes that easily fixed and they help you avoid the Curse of the Frankencourse. If you want to learn more check out the visual design tips in the e-learning community, download this free e-book, and join us at one of our Roadshow workshops.

What do you find to be common visual design mistakes?

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There are tons of free dingbat fonts available for download. And they’re great to use for your training and e-learning courses. Here’s what you already know:

• How to find and downloaded a bunch of those free dingbat and icon fonts.
• How to convert free those fonts to editable vector shapes.

Great! But what about managing those fonts and quickly previewing the icons and images you can use? It’s a pain to review them one-by-one.

Here’s an easy way to manage all of those free fonts and preview the ones you want to use to create graphic and icon files for your courses and presentation.

Free PowerPoint Template

You can download the PowerPoint template here. I made a simple video to show how to use it. Essentially you select the font characters and apply the dingbat font to see the correlation between the keystroke and what it produces.

Here are the basic steps:

• Create a slide for the font characters. I like to create a single slide for each wingding font.
• Select the characters (watch the video to see how you only select the letters you want to change).
• Apply the wingding font to the selected characters.
• This gives you a single screen with all of the characters and corresponding keystroke.
• If you want to save the slide, type in the name of the font for quick reference.

Click here to view the video.

As a bonus (and slightly different approach) Taylor at Nuts & Bolts Speed Training offers his free font cutter solution and a number of icons.

What do you do to manage and preview those wingding type fonts?

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Like many of you, I’m no graphic designer. I do have enough skill to get what I need or know enough to modify existing templates. The good thing is that today, it’s not that big of a deal because you get media assets like Articulate’s Content Library. So you have plenty of quality templates and stock images to help guide your design.

However, there are times when you may be stuck with a specific image and need to figure out how to create different (but matching) layouts without doing a bunch of edits in a different program. Here are some tips based on a presentation I gave recently on creating a professional portfolio. I had three images and used those to create different looks. And I did it all in PowerPoint.

I’ll show you what I look for and a few simple hacks to free up space and create different layouts.

Here’s a PowerPoint tutorial with more detail.

The tutorial below reviews what I’m sharing with more detail so that you can see how to choose and manipulate stock images for your courses and presentations.

Click here to view the tutorial video.

• How to create more whitespace and get rid of extra content.
• How to create matching backgrounds.
• How to create content areas.

PowerPoint Hack: Start with Matching Graphics

Whenever I find a stock image that works for my project, I try to find more from the same artist. And if that’s not possible, I try to find images that are very similar in style. This allows me to mix and match elements. In the case of my presentation, I started with these three images:

And with those three images, I was able to create various distinct slides.

PowerPoint Hack: Identify Content Buckets

By themselves, the stock images look fine and really don’t require any edits. However, when it comes to adding custom content, then the stock images have some constraints especially when it comes to adding content.

Identify places where you can add content (like images and text). If you start with a large enough stock image, you’ll be able to scale it and still maintain visual quality.

Here are a few areas from the images that can be modified to become content buckets.

PowerPoint Hack: Create Whitespace

After identifying places to put content, I look for ways to declutter the image and create more white space. There are a few ways to do that:

• Cover up part of the stock image to get rid of clutter.
• Zoom in and focus on clean flat areas.
• Crop and reposition the image.
• Create your own white space using image elements.

Here are just a few looks taken from a single image. In the first batch, I created three iterations of the one image.

And in the second, I replicated the background to give me enough whitespace and room to create my own matching images. In the presentation, I added a few white boxes to represent pages.

To learn more, watch the tutorial video. It provides the detailed step-by-step process.

The key point is that all of this is done right inside of PowerPoint and doesn’t require special skills or advanced features. What’s nice about this is that it only takes a few minutes and this approach provides an easy way to create professional quality layouts that are consistent in how they look.

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In an earlier post, we looked at three ways to use hotspots in your e-learning courses. In most cases, hotspots are used as invisible buttons for interactive e-learning. But today we’ll look at ways to use the hotspot feature in your drag and drop interactions where the hotspot isn’t a button.

Drag and Drop Basics

Generally, there are two main components to drag and drop interactions:

• an object that is dragged
• a target to accept the dragged object

I covered this in more detail when we looked at how to create drag and drop interactions.

Use the Hotspot as a Catch-all Target

Usually, there’s an obvious correct or incorrect target for drag and drop interactions. But what happens when the object is dropped outside of one of the target choices? In most cases, the object gets kicked back to the starting point as in the image below.

Dropped object snaps back to starting point when dropped outside of the target.

In the above example, the dragged object can only be dropped on one of the targets. If it’s dropped outside of the target, it bounces back to the starting point. This is usually the default setting and most common in drag and drop interactions.

Dropped object triggers an “oops” layer when dropped outside of the target on the catch-all hotspot.

However, the hotspot feature can serve as a catch-all target to provide feedback when objects are dragged and dropped outside of the desired target. When an object is dropped on the catch-all target it triggers the appropriate feedback. In the example below, the catch-all target triggers an “oops, try again” layer.

If you create a catch-all hotspot there are two things to do:

• Put the hotspot underneath all of the other targets. Otherwise, it covers the drop targets and the interaction won’t work.
• Determine how the dropped object responds. By default the object snaps to the center of the target; and since the target covers the entire screen, it looked weird sitting on top of the guy who’s in the center of the screen. In the example above I let it remain where it was dropped.

Use the Hotspot to Expand and Control the Drop Target

Another great use of the hotspot feature is to better manage the drop target area. Since the hotspot is transparent it can sit on top of other object and be sort of a surrogate drop target. Instead of dropping on what looks like the target, they’re actually dropping on the target hotspot.

By doing this, you can determine where the dropped object is displayed. Here are before and after examples.

Dropped objects align based on the target image and display outside of the box.

The objects are dragged to the box. By making the box image the drop target and tiling the objects, you can see that the objects actually align at the top of the box image.

Dropped objects align based on the hotspot target and align inside of the box.

In the example above, the box image isn’t the drop target. Instead, there’s a hotspot placed on top of the box image and centered over the opened box. This allows control of the alignment of the dropped objects to create the desired visual effect.

The hotspot is a great feature for creating interactive content. Most of the times it’s used as an invisible button. However, because it’s an easy-to-see green box (for production) and invisible to the end user, it’s a great feature to create large, catch-all targets. And it also works well for controlling how the dropped objects align and display.

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Apparently, the internet can’t get enough of free stock images as it seems there are new sites popping up every day. Truth be told, many of the sites aren’t very good and most of the images probably don’t have a good context for e-learning design.

Free Stock Images for E-Learning Resources

I’ve already shared some resources for free stock images in previous posts, as well as a few sites that seem to curate most of the free stock images. This saves a bunch of time because you don’t need to visit every single free stock image site.

• Easily Search for Free Stock Images
• Complete List of Free Stock Image Sites
• Free Stock Video Sites

And of course, if you have Articulate 360, then there’s already an assortment of e-learning templates, character packs, and all sorts of stock images, illustrations, icons, and videos.

More Free Stock Images for E-Learning

But if you need more free stock images for e-learning courses, here’s another new resource and the image quality is really great. The images are part of the Burst site, courtesy of Stopify and under Creative Commons Zero, which means you can do with them what you want and they don’t require attribution for commercial projects. But, it’s still good form to credit the source of the content and give them their props, if you can.

To make things a bit easier and less time consuming for you, I curated the office, business, and computer stock images. This should save you having to go through all of the images yourself. You can download the free stock images here. And of course, you can go to the source site and check out all of the other available images.

I always like the images of people meeting and working on computers. Which images do you like best? Feel free to share your thoughts via the comments.

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In an earlier post, we looked at how to convert dingbat and wingding fonts into vector images that you can use in your e-learning courses and presentations. They’re great for creating icons or bullet lists.

Not that you know how to convert the fonts into vector images, you need some fonts to use.

I reviewed a bunch of the free fonts and tried to sort to the those that are free for commercial use. If you want to search on your own, look for facefonts, dingbats, or wingdings. They tend to produce good results. Also, most of the free font sites have an assortment of these fonts.

As always when using free resources, confirm the licensing agreement and provide proper attribution. And it’s still good practice to give the owner props.

Free Faces & Character Fonts

• Tombats here’s a link to just the tombat fonts
• Anime Eyes add them to shapes to create unique objects
• Buen Chico great for cartoony avatars
• PWToonz stick figure characters
• Chamaco face font
• Face It faces
• Humeur faces
• Flyboy airplane signals
• IdentaKit series of fonts to build faces

Free Icon Fonts

• Heydings common icons
• Heydings control icons
• Icon-works
• Entypo icons
• Modern Pictograms
• Siruca Pictograms
• Web Symbols
• All dingbat fonts
• Guifx v2 Transports
• PWIcons hand-drawn icons
• PWSmallIcons

Free Shape & Arrow Fonts

• Komika Bubbles chat & conversation bubbles
• UI Fonts
• Recreational signs via Dept of Natural Resources
• Arrows that you can convert into editable shapes.
• PWNewArrows
• PWArrows
• Peax Arrows
• Cafeina Dig cool circle rings. Convert to vector and add brown with slight transparency onto of paper.
• Kool Dings 2 miscellaneous icons and other stuff
• PWFoodcons various food items

Are there certain fonts like these you like to use?

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In the e-learning community, a number of people shared free icons and shapes. There’s a lot of variety from which to choose. And they’re great for your courses, so make sure to take advantage of all of those free resources.

Looking at the free icons reminded me of simple trick we show in our PowerPoint workshops. It’s one I’ve shared in the past when I showed how to create custom shapes in PowerPoint, but today I’m adding a bit more detail.

Convert Dingbat Fonts to Free Vector Images

There are two video tutorials below. The first one jumps right into the basics of doing the conversion of the dingbat font to a vector shape and the second one adds a little more detail and context for those not familiar with the feature.

View tutorial video  (short version)

Here are the basic steps. You can watch the video for more detail and nuance. You’ll need PowerPoint 2013 or newer.

• Install a dingbat font or use wingdings (which should already be installed).
• Add a character on the slide.
• Duplicate it so you have two objects.
• Select both and then go to Format > Merge Shapes > Fragment. This converts the font into a bunch of vector shapes. Again, you’ll need PowerPoint 2013 or newer for this.
• At that point, you can edit and customize the vector as you desire.
• When done, select all of the shapes and group them. Ctrl+G is the shortcut.
• Right click and Save as image. I like to save as .PNG to preserve the transparency.

Here is a long form version of the video above with a more detail and context.

View tutorial video (detailed version)

This is super easy tip and a great way to take advantage of all of the wingdings and other symbol-type fonts available to you.

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Looking for just the right images is one of the most time-consuming activities we have when building our courses. It’s easy to get distracted and waste a lot of time. It’s gotten a lot easier over the years now that the software comes with professional templates and thousands of character poses.

As I build courses, I often use the same characters and a few common poses. Which means I don’t need to always search through all of the poses available. And I suspect many of you do the same. So today, I’m going to show you a simple tip to help speed up your production. It’s all based on assembling your own character templates. I walk through the steps below, but the video provides more detailed instructions.

Click here to view the video.

Create E-Learning Character Sets

Even if you have hundreds of characters, odds are you use the same handful over and over again. Here’s how to create some simple pre-built character sets that make it easy to use characters and repeat poses.

• Select a character and insert it on the slide.
• Create multiple states of the character. This trick works if you only insert a handful of frequently used or common poses. Otherwise, it defeats the purpose of the template.
• Name the slide the same as the character or descriptive of the type of poses. For example, you may insert only sign-holding poses. In that case, the slide could be titled, Brandon-Holding-Signs.

Create E-Learning Character Set Templates

• Once you have a slide with the character, save it as a template. This creates a template you can insert into your course. That’s it. Whenever you want to use that character, insert the slide and then copy and paste the character where you need it. Then set the initial state.
• Ideally, you maintain one character template so it’s easier to manage. In that case, import the new character slide into the main character template file. And keep adding to it as you create custom character sets. This way it’s much easier to view and manage.
• Bonus tip: you can do the same thing for custom interactions by saving them in a single interaction template.

Save Time Using E-Learning Characters

Now that you have some pre-built character poses, you’ll save some time in your production. When you need one of those characters, insert it from the template and then copy and paste the character into your slide.

The character will always include those starting states. You can set an initial state and use triggers to dynamically change it if you like. Another benefit is sharing the template with your team.

And you’re not limited to just the characters that come with the software. You can also do this with your own characters and the photos you take. Or you can do it for background images. Perhaps you want a template of production images, inside a warehouse, or the cubicle farm in the office. The process is the same.

The software already comes with characters so searching and inserting characters is easy enough. This tip works great if you use a few common poses and don’t want to spend time searching. Set up the templates and you have a good starting point.

Assuming that you want to create some character templates like this, what groups would you create? Talking poses? Sign holders?

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We all love free tools to help us save time and resources so that we are more efficient building our elearning courses. Here are two free multimedia applications that I use quite a bit.

Color Picking with Color Cop

If you’re using Storyline that’s already easy to do because there’s a built in color picker. However, if you need to pick colors outside of your authoring tool, Color Cop is a good one to use.

I use color pickers all the time. One way I integrate colors into my slides is by adding an image to my screen and then I pick colors from the image to create my buttons, background and accent colors. This way everything kind of look like it belongs together.

Create & Share Screenshots with ShareX

ShareX is a pretty slick application and I use it all the time to create quick screenshots and share them with team members and customers. I find it really useful to provide visual feedback when working on courses.

I use a keyboard shortcut to grab the screenshot and then it automatically uploads to my service of choice. I have use my Google Photos account, but images can be uploaded to all sorts of services, which can be seen in the image below.

ShareX isn’t limited to just screenshots. In fact, it does quite a bit more (almost too much more). For example, you can color pick, edit images, and create animated .gifs. Here’s a screenshot of some of the other applications that are part of ShareX.

You can even create QR codes like this one below. Check it out and see where it goes.

So there you have it, two free multimedia applications that will come in handy for your elearning development. And if you want even more recommendations, check out this weekly challenge when community members shared some of their favorite tools.

Are there any free applications you use? Feel free to share in the comments below.

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Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

Free resources always come in handy when building courses or slide presentations. At most of my workshops we take a few minutes to share different free resources people use. It’s a great way to be reminded of resources you may have already bookmarked but have forgotten. And of course, there’s always something new to learn from others when the share what they use.

At this point, I find that there’s not a lot of new free resources being added. So I compiled the resources and put them in some sense of order to make it a bit easier to parse. I can’t vouch for all of the sites but from what I can tell, they’re all legit.

Most of the resources are free. And with all things free, be sure to check on the usage terms and give proper attribution. Here’s a post on how to did this: how to use free assets in commercial projects.

Where to Get Help from the Community

• E-learning 101
• Free downloads
• Free ebooks
• Weekly challenges & examples

Where to Get Free Resources from Your Organization

• Marketing team: they usually have graphics and other collateral
• Web team: collection of online resources
• Public relations: public facing graphics

Create Your Own & Share

• Take your own pictures of people and share
• Walk around organization and get background and ambient images
• Get inspiration from stock photo sites and try to mimic them

Free Resources: Icons

• https://www.iconfinder.com/
• http://www.flaticon.com/
• https://thenounproject.com/
• https://icons8.com/
• http://icons.mysitemyway.com/

Placeholder Content

• http://dummyimage.com/
• 3 Ways to Get Placeholder Text for Your E-Learning Courses

Free Stock Photos

• Search most free sites: https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/stock-up
• Ditto above: http://librestock.com/
• http://www.1001freedownloads.com/free-photos/?order=popular
• https://unsplash.com/ or search http://www.arthurweill.fr/Unsplash/en
• http://startupstockphotos.com/
• http://www.lifeofpix.com/
• http://deathtothestockphoto.com/
• https://stocksnap.io/
• http://mmtstock.com/grid/
• http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/
• http://publicdomainarchive.com/free-stock-photos/
• http://getrefe.com/downloads/category/free/
• https://goodstock.photos/
• http://www.splitshire.com/category/technology/page/2/
• http://magdeleine.co/people/page/2/
• http://nos.twnsnd.co/
• http://www.gratisography.com/
• http://kaboompics.com/
• http://jaymantri.com/
• https://graphicleftovers.com/dashboard
• http://www.freeimages.com/
• https://pixabay.com/
• http://morguefile.com/
• htt/p://www.stockvault.net
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
• https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
• https://community.articulate.com/articles/free-stock-photo-sites-for-e-learning
• https://www.graphicstock.com This isn’t free but I switched to this when the Dollar Photo Club shut down. It’s only $99/yr.

Free Medical Images

• https://visualsonline.cancer.gov/
• http://phil.cdc.gov/phil/home.asp
• http://www.stockphotosforfree.com/

Free Illustrations

• http://www.freepik.com/
• https://www.canva.com/
• http://www.vecteezy.com/
• http://www.designcomics.com/
• https://graphicmama.com/freebies
• https://pixabay.com/
• https://thehungryjpeg.com/freebies/ (weekly)
• https://openclipart.org/
• http://www.wordle.net/
• http://opengameart.org/

Free Templates

• Articulate community
• Rapid E-Learning Blog
• E-learning community members
• http://www.duarte.com/slidedocs/

Free Audio

• https://www.speakpipe.com/voice-recorder
• Free audio for elearning
• Free audio sound effects

Free Fonts

• https://fonts.google.com/
• http://www.fontsquirrel.com/
• http://www.dafont.com/

Free Video

• Dozen free video sites
• http://www.wingclips.com
• http://www.coverr.co
• https://videos.pexels.com/
• https://pixabay.com/
• https://www.unstock.io/

Deal Sites

These sites aren’t free but they often offer great deals. For example, I’ve been able to get a lifetime membership to a graphics site for $49 and picked up a bunch of cutout people images for just a few dollars. It’s worth subscribing to these types of sites just to see what deals come your way. Most of the deals are not relevant to elearning but you can just delete those emails.

• http://www.mightydeals.com/
• https://www.inkydeals.com/
• Appsumo.com

If there’s a free resource or site you like to use, feel free to post in the comments. Spammers will be deleted.

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.