Best of 2016: Resources to Boost Your Visual Design Skills

If you’re not a graphic designer—or don’t have access to a designer’s services—coming up with courses that look compelling, professional, and cohesive can seem daunting. But the good news is there are strategies you can employ that will quickly earn you cred as an ace visual designer.

As we continue our Best of 2016 series, we’ve rounded up some articles that are chock-full of advice, techniques, and resources to help you step up your visual design expertise. Start here:

• Visual Design How-Tos for E-Learning Developers: Here’s a comprehensive roundup of all the best visual design articles, e-books, and free downloads on E-Learning Heroes. You’ll want to bookmark all the links in this article so you can always have these go-to strategies at your fingertips.
• Visual Design for Beginners: Unlocking the Power of Metaphors: One useful technique for creating a design theme for an e-learning project is exploring a visual metaphor, or graphics that instantly help learners understand how to interact with the content in your course because they recall real-life analogs to your design. In this article you’ll learn how to apply visual metaphors to create interactive e-learning.
• 10 Overlooked Sources for Design Inspiration: Feeling like you don’t know how to come up with the desired look and feel for your courses? Here are some great ideas for finding new, thought-provoking design inspiration.
• What Is Design Thinking and Why Does It Matter?: Design thinking is an approach to solving problems that asks you to think deeply about how users will encounter your content. Read this guide to see how design-thinking practices will help you become a better designer in every way!
• Visual Design Tips: How to Create an E-Learning Scene: Scenes are a great way to create compelling, realistic, and relatable experiences for learners—and in this article by Veronica Budnikas you’ll learn how to create a “scene” from scratch with simple graphics.

Looking for more of the Best of 2016 series? Check out the two roundups we’ve shared so far:

• Best of 2016: The 10 Most Popular PowerPoint Downloads
• Best of 2016: The Top 10 Most Inspiring Storyline 2 Examples

And stay tuned for even more goodies coming soon!