When I worked at this one place, we could only use a single PowerPoint slide for any presentation or anytime we created content in PowerPoint. There was nothing particularly special about the slide other than the fact it was the approved slide because it had the company logo and colors plastered all over it.

This became an issue when we transitioned to one of the early rapid e-learning applications. Since the courses started in PowerPoint, the branding was on every slide and took up limited screen space that we needed to actually teach people.

However, what we lacked in a great learning experience was made up covered by the fact that all employees knew where they worked.

A constant challenge with courses is how to deal with the organization’s visual identity and various branding requirements which usually have little to do with learning.

So, here are a few questions I’d like to pose for discussion:

• Do you really need to brand your courses?
• How does it contribute to the learning experience?
• Does it help meet any learning objectives?
• If there was no branding requirement, how would it change the course?
• Should it be a requirement that even in live training sessions, the marketing team inserts a sign twirler who screams out the name of the company every few minutes?

I’ve built plenty of courses over the years and have spent more than enough hours with clients and marketing team. So, I know many of the reasons we have for adding the brand content to our courses. I just wonder if it really matters and what value it adds.

What do you think?

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One of the big challenges when building courses is having to deal with organization’s brand and visual identity and figuring out how to work it into the course. And to do it in a way so the course doesn’t look like a billboard or race car.

Here are some quick tips on how to incorporate the company’s brand into your courses without being overly intrusive on the learning objectives and actual course content.

Get Rid of the Branding

Before we get started, here’s a question worthy of debate: do you really need to brand your courses? What does it accomplish? Does it make a better learning experience? I understand the need for good looking design and meeting the organization’s need that way. But how does all of that branding fit into meeting the learning objectives (assuming there are some)?

I’ve built plenty of courses over the years and have spent more than enough hours with the customers and marketing folks. So I know all the reasons we have for adding the brand content to our courses. I just wonder if it really matters and what value it adds.

What do you think?

With that said here are a few ways to work your brand into the course that avoids some of the internal bickering and doesn’t get you fired. For this post, I’m going to use the E-learning Heroes community for my examples.

Create a Landing Page

Instead of a course that features a logo and design on each screen, create a single-entry point that provides the branding info at the beginning of the course. After that, reserve the rest of the course for the learning part of the e-learning.

You can do this by creating a landing page or gate screen. The branding is offered upfront, and the rest of the course is mostly devoid of it.

• Landing Pages. Do a search for landing pages to get some ideas on design and layout. And then build one for your organization. Use it at the beginning of all your courses.

• Gate Screens. Build a gate screen. You can use one at the beginning or use them between sections or modules.

Above are some quick mockups based on the community page. I know a few companies that do this. I think it’s a workable solution because it adds the branding info that marketing and management requests. But it also reserves the rest of the screen space for the learning content and interactions.

Optimize the Player

Most e-learning courses include a player; and that player can be customized to some extent. What are the main brand elements for you to consider and how can they be incorporated into the player?

Generally, the visual part of the brand deals with some images like a logos and backgrounds, color schemes, typography, visual design, and screen layouts.

• Incorporate the organization’s brand by colorizing the template to match the color schemes.
• Leverage the logo or presenter panels for the company logo. Those can remain persistent which helps with the clients that want the logo on every screen.
• Use the same (or similar fonts). Few corporate fonts are standard system fonts. Ask for the “official” font or try to find a similar one using What the Font. Often you can find comparable fonts that are free via Google Web Fonts. Most people won’t notice the subtle difference. And if they do, just tell them you’re using the “official” font for e-learning courses.

Mimic the Organization’s Web Site

Changing player colors and adding logos is easy enough. The more challenging issue is capturing the right visual design, especially if the organization’s made an investment to project a specific look and feel for the brand. And this is critical if what you build is presented outside the organization.

Ideally, you get the organization to help you brand the courses. But the reality is most of us won’t get access to a graphic designer to help. Considering this, here are a few ways you can glean the organization’s branding from the web site where they did hire a graphic designer.

• Buttons are common. Each site has some sort of button or tab. Recreate those by copying their different states such as normal, hover, down, and selected.

• Identify a few core screen layouts based on the web site. Make note of the way the items are arranged, especially things like white space and margins.
• Look for potential content holders. I look for those individual elements like boxes and side panels that could become content holders or interactive items.
• Where are the interactive elements? There are three things we do to interact with the screen: click, hover, and drag. How are those used in the website? Try to recreate them in your e-learning application. And if there aren’t interactive elements, what can you make interactive? For example, instead of static box, it has a hover state when moused over.
• Colors are key. The company website already has an official brand. Mimic the general layout and use the correct colors. Here’s a more detailed post on how you can color pick colors or upload a screenshot of the site and have one of those color scheming sites pick colors for you.

If you need to brand your courses, these three suggestions should help. Start simple with a landing page and work your brand into the player and course screens by mimicking the organization’s web site and color schemes.

What do you do to incorporate the company’s brand into your courses?

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E-learning courses are mostly screens of content made up of media: text, shapes, illustrations, pictures, and video.

Adding those things to your course is simple, usually just a matter of inserting said media onto the screen. However, building a cohesive course is more than just inserting stuff on a screen. There are other considerations.

Design the Look of the E-Learning Course

What’s on a screen?

• Fonts. They are more than the text you read; they’re also a graphic. Which fonts are you using in your course? Are they contextually aligned with your content?
• Shapes. Shapes can have straight edges or rounded; they can have outlines or not. The shape can represent something elegant or informal.
• Illustrations. There are all sorts of illustrative styles. One popular style today is the corporate Memphis look. Of course, there are many designers who find it to be barren.

And this brings us to a key consideration when working with multimedia: the bullet points above speak to some visual design requirements. Who will design what you need? What is the correct imagery and use of fonts and desired color schemes?

A challenge for many e-learning developers: having ideas about what you want and executing on those ideas is not the same. I see lots of good courses that are not designed well. The cause is usually that the e-learning developer lacks the technical skill to construct the right media.

Create Audio and Video Resources

There are similar considerations for other multimedia such audio and video.

Recording audio is easy and straightforward in most of the authoring tools. However, they don’t tend to have a lot of sophistication when it comes to editing or managing the audio.

For simple audio, recording from the authoring tool is fine. But for longer audio, there are considerations about how to record, who will record it, and how it’s all managed.

You can do it all in-house or DIY, but you do get what you pay for. I figure non-professional talent gives you presentation quality audio. It’s inexpensive, gets the job done, yet isn’t going to be perfect. But it’s not the same as pro-quality narration.

The good thing today is that there are many voice over artists and talent services where getting professional audio at a reasonable cost is viable.

Video is another one of those tricky issues. Today’s smart phones have better capabilities than I had doing professional video work 25 years ago. It’s easy to shoot video and edit it. But there is a significant difference between a DIY video and getting something done professionally. Or at a minimum, spending time on edits to get things to look right and not drag on.

The big question for any of the course’s multimedia is who is going to determine and design what you need? And then who is going to produce the media?

I throw this out because the course will look like something. And you’ll put something on the screen. And there’s a cost associated with it. Doing it yourself may cost less money but may impact the quality of what you produce.

Thus, at the beginning of the project time needs to be spent on the media requirements and production considerations. And then determine if there needs to be a budget to accommodate those requirements.

How do you determine those things when you start an e-learning project?

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Articulate 360’s Content Library comes with thousands of e-learning templates. Each template is made up of theme fonts and theme colors. Theme fonts and colors are an easy way to manage and update course files.

Here’s a common issue and easy solution when troubleshooting e-learning courses. Instead of using theme colors many developers do quick color picks or custom colors. This is fine until you need to make a change to the slide and the colors aren’t updating when you change the theme color.

Our template developers have a simple technique to check the theme colors and make sure that they’re used throughout the various template slides.

Here are the steps:

• Create a new color theme.
• Make every color bright yellow.
• Save the theme colors.
• When you apply this theme, everything on the slide should use those colors.

Whenever you need to test a template to ensure it’s using the theme, apply that test theme color. Everything on the slide should be bright yellow. Whatever isn’t, is not using a theme color. That makes it easy to fix issues on the slides.

The example above, when I apply the yellow test theme, all of the objects change except the purple circle because that’s not using a theme color.

Simple tip. Easy to do. And a big timesaver if you use theme colors, which you should.

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When someone first starts to build an e-learning course, one of the first things I recommend is determining the colors they’ll use. And from there, create a template and assign the theme colors.

The benefits to theme colors is that they allow consistent use of colors throughout the course; and if one needs to change, it can be changed once, and that change is applied wherever the color is used.

The next recommendation is to determine how to use theme colors. This is often confusing because, you get six theme colors and five derivatives per color. However, there’s no rhyme or reason in terms of how they should be used. They’re just six boxes that can be filled with colors. You can use those boxes anyway you like.

But that’s not how you should use them.

I recommend that you define a theme color structure and then use them consistently. This way, every time you build a course the theme colors are set up the same and you can easily swap them out when needed.

How to Set Up Theme Colors

Here are a few ideas that may work:

• You get six theme colors. But you don’t really need to use all six.
• Define how you do want to use the colors, whether it’s six or four or two.

• Use theme colors consistently in all templates you create.
• Courses usually have a main color and an accent color. If you only used two colors, you’d have twelve to use because of the iterations. That may be all you need.
• Most courses have some positive and negative feedback color, usually green and red. Use two of the theme colors for positive and negative feedback.

Here is one way you could define your theme colors:

• Accent 1: base color. Usually this is your core brand color.
• Accent 2: accent color. Most brands have an accent color. If you don’t have one, you can use a color theme site to create one. I typically will select a complementary color of the base color.
• Accent 3: open. Why create a color you don’t need?
• Accent 4: open.
• Accent 5: positive color. Green pulled from the base color’s palette. Use this for quiz feedback or icons to show a good decision.
• Accent 6: negative color. Red pulled from the base color’s palette. Use this for quiz feedback or icons to show a wrong decision.

For the two open colors, I may look through my organization’s web site and marketing collateral and see if there are other secondary colors used that I could add to the palette. Most of the times, two colors are all I need.

If every course is built with consistent use of theme colors, they can be swapped in seconds. This is a critical part of building and re-using interactions and templates. It’s a little more work upfront (which should be done anyway). But in the long-term it offers some time-saving benefits.

Do you have a strategy when using theme colors?

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One way to speed up production in your e-learning course design is to use themed slides. You can create robust and visually varied templates like the ones you get in Content Library. The templates are a combination of layouts and two themed elements: fonts and colors. However, you don’t need to have a complex template to leverage theme colors.

Theme colors allow you to pre-determine the colors you’ll use in your course’s slides. There are several benefits and reasons when using theme colors.

Make Easy Updates to Theme Colors for E-Learning

Here’s a common scenario: insert an image and then do a color pick of the image to pull a color to use for outlines or shapes in the course. Later someone suggest changing the color. The challenge is going through every slide and making changes where that color was used.

Use theme colors to quickly modify all the objects with that same theme color. This doesn’t require a lot of consistency in terms of how you use the colors. It just means that if you do a color pick, for example, you add that to one of the accent colors so you can apply that accent color through the course.

If you have red shapes and they need to be blue, if you used a theme color to fill the shape all you need to do is change the theme color.

Create a Loaded Palette of Theme Colors for E-Learning

You get six accent colors, and each has five derivatives. You don’t need to have a real strategy when using theme colors. You get six slots. Figure out what six colors you need in your course and then create a palette, so you always have those six available to you.

You can use the colors willy nilly with no consideration to any real structure. The key advantage is having a palette of desired colors on hand.

Develop a Strategy for Theme Colors for E-Learning

Assuming you build a lot of templates and you re-use them, then it makes sense to be strategic about how you use the theme colors. You get six slots. Use them the same way every time you create a theme color. That makes it easy to create a new theme and re-use templates because you know that the theme colors are applied the same way to the same objects.

Determine how you want to use the color slots and then use them that way consistently. This allows you to quickly apply new color themes knowing that the entire template will change, and the colors will make universal changes to the entire course.

Some people are very strategic an organized in how they use theme colors. And some just use them with no sense of structure. They just want a place to load some colors and have quick access. That’s fine, too.

What you want to avoid is using single colors outside the theme that can’t easily or quickly be updated later. Theme colors help prevent that and save time when building courses whether your strategic or just using a palette.

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Templates offer a lot of value and power in your e-learning course design. They help keep things consistent, provide a good starting structure, and they make it easy to swap and replace theme elements.

The main benefit of a template is saving time. But templates come with constraints and when attempting to customize them you may be robbed of the time saved. This is something I see all the time when working with e-learning developers.

To keep things simple, I like to consider templates from two perspectives.

Option 1: The E-Learning Template is Plug and Play

Use a template where the layout and all its features are pre-determined. The goal here is to select a templated screen and expect to make minimal changes. The value of the template is that everything is there and all you need to do is add your content.

All you want is a slide with a specific look and swap out the placeholders for your course content. You don’t want to change layouts, redesign the slide, add new elements, or customize colors.

The core value is that the template is pre-designed and all you do is add content. This is great for quick authoring and for the person who has limited graphic design experience.

Option 2: The E-Learning Template is Customizable

Use a template where all the features are themed. This usually consists of layouts, colors, and fonts. The value of this type of template is that you can easily modify it by making universal changes to the theme elements. And those changes are applied across all the slides in the course.

This second perspective requires a bit more forethought and restraint in using the features. For example, all the text and colors on the slide need to use theme text and colors. Also, all layouts need to be mapped to the same placeholders, otherwise, they’re not interchangeable.

Avoid the Mushy Middle

Think of these two perspectives as two ends of a spectrum. On one end you have the convenience of a pre-built screen that only requires content. Select it and add the content.

On the other is a screen that is built to be modified. It’s not tied to content but the theme elements.

Realistically, you can do both by making a designed slide with themed elements. But…and this is a big but (cue Pee Wee Herman) most of the issues I see when people work with templates is that they want the convenience of plug and play and then they want to customize, too. Inevitably this leads to a lot of time wasted trying to make things work.

So, I usually recommend this: if you use a template you didn’t create, accept the fact that what you select is what you get and all you need to do is add your content. Don’t expect to import it and then begin to make too many edits. At that point you lose the power of what the template gives you.

Or…

Create your own templates. Design specific layouts and multiple versions of them. For example, if you build a tabs interaction, design a 3-tab, 4-tab, and 5-tab version. Don’t just design a 3-tab and expect to modify it.

When you build the slide template, only use theme elements.

• That means you use create placeholder layouts and use them consistently on the various slides.
• Determine your theme colors and only use colors from your theme. And use them consistently.
• Set your theme fonts (usually a heading and body). And all text on the screen uses the theme font. You don’t insert that one cute curly font to make your course engaging. One, it isn’t engaging. And two, it’s not a theme font.
• Before using a template like that, you determine a new theme font and color scheme. And then insert the slide and apply the new theme elements.

Notice how the first option is just plug and play and the second requires a lot more intention and more production? That’s the big consideration. The template should provide some time-saving guidance. If you need to make a bunch of tweaks or mess things up because you didn’t plan on the theme elements, have you really saved any time? Did the template offer real value?

There you have it: two perspectives on when to use a template. Use it as is for quick authoring with minimal changes. Or use templates where you can make universal changes to the themes and quickly create new looks.

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Here are a couple of fun activities around visual design. They’re not “e-learning” course design activities but they are relevant because e-learning courses have to be constructed using common design concepts and skills.

Go through the activities and see what you learn.

What Kind of Course Designer Are You?

Click here to view the design activity.

Here are a few things that come to mind after the activity:

• There’s a tension between being too organized and not being organized enough. I find that I am probably less organized than I should be and then I have to go back and fix things. A good example is naming objects as I go along rather than waiting to troubleshoot and find that not naming makes it harder to figure out what’s there. On the other hand, sometimes being too organized does constrain the creative process.
• What inspires my designs? I like to use Dribbble and some other design sites to get ideas around layouts and using colors.
• From a course design perspective, reflective questions are a great way to get people to process information. Generally, we push bullet point after bullet point. Perhaps there’s a way to reframe your slide content so that the information is delivered via reflective questions.

Course Design: What’s Your Font Style?

Click here to view the font activity.

• I like this type of activity for e-learning. Make decisions and move on without hitting a submit button. And then at the end get some sort of consolidated feedback.
• My font was Ariata. I’m not sure how the activity is graded, but I played around with the quiz and often came up with Ariata. Which goes to how this type of activity could work in e-learning: you can show whatever you want at the end. So get your learner’s to read stuff during the selection process and then show them whatever you want at the end. The card selection is how you present what may have been bullet points or slides. And the end is your summary. Easy peasy.

What did you learn?

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When it comes to the visual design of you course, there’s on thing you can do to add context. And it doesn’t require a graphics design degree.

Replace the bland default template with a single background image. Find the one image that best establishes the context of the course. Once you have an image, there are things you can do.

Here are a few simple tips.

Determine the Course Context

I like to focus on industry. And then within an industry you may have specific environments like meeting rooms and offices. A corporate business course will have a different image than one on training medical staff. What single image quickly establishes context?

Keep the Design Simple

Images communicate a lot of information. You want context without a lot of distraction. This is especially true when the background image contains people. We tend to look towards the face. If you do find an image to be distracting, you could add a blur to it (or other design element). This shows the visual context but with the applied blur effect the person is drawn to the course content and not distracted by decorative elements in the image.

You Need Placeholders for Course Content

If you’re using a single image, you need to consider where the content goes. I like to look for images with obvious content spaces. That means less for me to edit or design. A common one is the file folder. It looks business-y and it gives me a place to put content.

The images below have good empty areas that can hold the course content.

Vary the Imagery

Since you’ll be working over a series of screens, try to find more than one image that meets the context requirements. You can use the different images to establish different types of content or sections. If you can’t find images that look like they came from the same place, you can add color filters or other effects to make them seem more cohesive and as if the belong together.

In the example below, the images were from different sources. But the visual context (fire department) and the color overlay tie them together.

The tips above don’t replace solid graphic design. But it does help the person who has limited time or skills step away from the default layouts that may be a bit bland. And it helps make those screens visually rich and contextual.

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Who doesn’t like free?

Recently, I shared these free resources: free animated gifs, free medical images, and free open doodles illustrations.

Today, I’m sharing more because you can never have enough of the free stuff.

One challenge with stock imagery is that it’s stock which means it’s mostly generic and doesn’t meet all needs. Another challenge unfortunately is that most stock imagery lacks diversity. Here’s a good start to fixing that problem.

The designers at blackillustrations.com provide a starter pack of illustrations that are free to use for commercial and personal projects.

What’s included?

• 50+ illustrations
• Business images
• Medical images
• Multiple formats including PNG, SVG, and AI

They also have a really nice education pack available for $38 that could come in handy for your online training programs. But of course, that isn’t free.

The pack is free, but as always, if you find them valuable you’re able to pay something for the developer’s time. And even though they don’t ask for attribution, it’s a nice gesture. Here’s a post on how to provide attribution in your courses.

Hope these help. If so, thank the developers and pass it on.

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I ran across two articles recently that made me wonder about the state of today’s e-learning courses.

The first article was on how websites are all starting to look the same. They did a study to confirm it. In the second article, the author makes some good points on how a lot of this new design is sterile and lacks personality.

While the two articles dealt with website design, there are a lot of parallels to e-learning course design.

Why Does Everything Look the Same?

There are a number of reasons why things look the same.

• There’s a commonality to design because of trends, but they come and go. A few years ago everything had bevels, then glossy buttons, then reflections, then skeuomorphic, then anti-skeuomorphic, then neuomorphism, and on and on. People design based on trends to look fresh and modern.
• A lot of design follows a templated structure with layouts, grids, and common understanding of user interface (UX) design. There’s all sorts of new understanding and rules for UX design based on research and an evolving industry. In addition, courses have technical requirements and need to be designed to accommodate mobile and accessibility needs.
• The technology is changing. If you want a nice-looking website, you don’t need to be a programmer. Just sign up for Wix or Squarespace. Same thing with e-learning courses. Gone are the days of specialized course developers. I addressed that in this post on the next generation e-learning tools.  The tools like Rise 360 and Rise.com are becoming more prevalent. They offer easy, form-based construction. And with that is a consistent look and feel of the courses. You don’t need to know design, you assemble your learning content and pretty much plug and play.

Looking the Same Isn’t Bad Is It?

As noted above, there are a lot of legitimate reasons why things look the same. And those aren’t bad. And the reality is that things will evolve as the industry evolves and develops new norms. Plus, people will get tired of the way things look.

David Anderson shares a funny observation on how to be a consultant. If everything your client has is square, you tell them, what they need is a circle. And if all they have is circles, you tell them what they need is a square. There you go, consulting 101: if your design is skeuomorphic, you need flat. If your design is flat, try skeuomorphic.

Things change and what’s big today won’t be tomorrow.

Legitimate Concerns

“We are emotional and sentimental beings; we survive on self-expression.” – Tobias Van Schneider

I’ve met plenty of clients or “experts” on user experience design who follow a bunch of rules and won’t budge from them. Or marketing people with some ridiculous branding requirements for their courses. What happens is that the objective of learning is lost in the rules and requirements dictated by other objectives from people not concerned about teaching. Because of this, courses become boring and sterile. They lack life and are not very engaging for the learner. And it’s just as bad for the person tasked to build them.

An e-learning course is about teaching PEOPLE (at least in an ideal world). Regardless of current design trends, we should build learning experiences that are relevant and human. And for the course author, we yearn to be creative and want jobs that are more than just copying and pasting content from one medium to the next.

We have to work within the context of what we have. The person who possesses custom programming skills, has more options. But that’s not where most of us are at. However,  just because we have constraints doesn’t mean we can’t be creative. In fact, I often find that constraints force more creativity than having none.

My big question for e-learning today: what is the Art Deco of e-learning design? Or better yet, what can we do to get away from sterile courses and make them more human-centered? How can we can exercise our creative skills and build courses that are both engaging and successful? Interested in your thoughts.

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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.

Of course your e-learning software comes with a great assortment of e-learning templates and characters to use in your online training courses. But, really, who doesn’t like additional free illustrations to use in e-learning courses?

Recently, I shared a few free illustrations that can be modified for your online training. Hopefully, you found a use for them.

Free Illustrations for E-Learning

Here are a few more from Open Doodles. What I like about them is that they’re simple and they’d work great for an informal course or one where you want a more organic look and feel.

Modify the Free Illustrations

What’s nice about these illustrations is that you can modify them simply with a few clicks.

On the site, you’ll see the option to download the graphics, modify them or even download some compositions.

Ideas for Free Illustrations

Download the files as SVG and you can edit them. If you’re not sure how to use them, they offer a few examples that may give you some ideas.

I’d consider them to be good decorative images to either set a tone for your course or add some visual interest.

Hope you enjoy. Be sure to give props to those made them available.

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.