How To Create A Well-Designed eLearning Course
A well-designed eLearning course improves readability and helps learners to navigate through a particular course's content smoothly. Without the right graphic design, which includes images, typography, layout, and color scheme, even the best-written content would be confusing to learners. If you are new to design, below are eLearning graphic design best practices that you should consider using in your course to engage your learners.
How Well Do You Know Your Learners?
One of the beauties of eLearning design is the ability to manipulate the design elements to meet learners' needs. Knowing your audience before including an eLearning graphic design in your course is vital. This enables you to include elements that serve their needs. The font style (and size), images, and colors that you select must greatly benefit your learners. They must be able to serve their needs and promote easy readability and smooth navigation.
Typography
I'm sure you'll agree with me that good typography helps to create visual hierarchy and enhances the readability of course content. Not all fonts work the same way on different devices, so use fonts that work perfectly on different kinds of devices.
When selecting your fonts, you should keep in mind the following:
- While developing your eLearning course, choosing more than two font styles will clutter the page and confuse your readers. Therefore, it's a best practice to use one or a combination of two font styles to achieve an effective eLearning program.
- Use fonts that work well on both PC devices and mobile devices. Examples of fonts that will never fail you are Arial, Verdana, and Helvetica. Sans serif fonts are much better on PC devices as compared to serif fonts.
Ensure that the font size you are choosing is not too big or too small. In short, ensure you have legibility in mind when choosing font sizes. For instance, the size of 14-16pxs is okay for the body of your text.
Use The Right Images
Whatever you include in your course, be it texts, images, or anything else, you must possess the ability to support your course objectives. So if it's on the screen, it must add value and not detract from your course. It's not necessary to add decorative images to your course—in the name of filling spaces—if they'll not add value to your course.
Use The Right Color
No doubt, choosing the right color mix is an essential part of your eLearning graphic design. Color choice is way more than just your taste. It's not just choosing colors that feel right to your taste, but rather selecting a color mix that complements well. You need to choose complementary colors that not only possess the ability to evoke emotion but colors that you are also able to connect to your course.
To enhance readability, opt for colors with high contrast for your typography. Usually, a black text is perfect and safe on a white background. For your color scheme, you should avoid involving more than three colors in your design. It tends to distract the readers from getting the overall value and objectives of your eLearning course.
Use The Right Layouts To Convey Meaning
It's not right to assume that your learners automatically understand the text and graphics you place on the screen. So, try and create relationships that help to guide their understanding. Layouts have a direct impact on learners' knowledge and retention of a course.
Below are some guides to help you structure your layout to convey meaning:
- Positioning technique is important to consider for effective eLearning graphic design. Ensure that you position similar objects next to each other to convey a relationship.
- Ensure that the layout and screen are easy to scan. This will help to attract your learners to your eLearning course.
- Make sure that relevant information gets placed in the right spot, a place where learners can easily see it. It's not advisable to put important information inside a click-to-reveal link.
Whitespace
Using irrelevant graphics to fill up whitespaces is not a good eLearning graphic design practice. Instead, leave white areas in your course to help in reducing cognitive overload and improving the visual presentation of your eLearning course.
Here are some guides to increase whitespaces in an eLearning course:
- Shorter paragraphs and bullet points help increase your course white spaces.
- To enhance attraction, use whitespaces between your paragraphs and graphics.
Keeping these eLearning graphic design best practices in mind while developing your eLearning course will help you achieve effective training.