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E-Learning Challenges
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Using Style Guides in E-Learning Course Design #481

DavidAnderson's avatar
11 days ago

E-Learning Style Guides #481: Challenge | Recap

Whether you’re creating a quick, single-slide interaction or a massive hundred-slide course, nailing down your design elements before you start building will save you tons of time and frustration down the road.

And that’s where a style guide comes into play. 

With a style guide, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel on every slide. By establishing design constraints for fonts, colors, and layouts, you can focus on the content rather than designing from slide to slide. And that’s what this week’s challenge is all about.

🏆 Challenge of the Week

This week’s challenge is to create a simple style guide and apply it to one or more slides to show how your styles will look in an actual course.

Since style guides come in all shapes and sizes and there’s no one-size-fits all approach. For this week’s challenge, you can build and share any type of style guidance you like.

You can keep your style guide simple by specifying fonts and colors or go further by defining the appearance of interactive objects and layouts.

🧰 Resources

Articles

✨ Share Your E-Learning Work

  • Comments: Use the comments section below to link your published example and blog post.
  • Forums: Start a new thread and share a link to your published example.
  • Personal blog: If you have a blog, please consider writing about your challenges. We'll link to your posts so your great work gets even more exposure.
  • Social media: If you share your demos on Twitter or LinkedIn, try using #ELHChallenge so your tweeps can follow your e-learning coolness.

🙌 Last Week’s Challenge:

Before you offer style guidance in this week’s challenge, check out the boo-tifully designed Halloween examples your fellow Coursebusters shared over the past week:

Halloween-Inspired E-Learning Examples RECAP #480: Challenge | Recap

👋 New to the E-Learning Challenges?

The weekly e-learning challenges are ongoing opportunities to learn, share, and build your e-learning portfolios. You can jump into any or all of the previous challenges anytime you want. I’ll update the recap posts to include your demos.

Learn more about the challenges in this Q&A post and why and how to participate in this helpful article.

📆 Upcoming Challenges

  • E-Learning Challenge #482 (11.08): Using asymmetrical layouts. Think course starters with an emphasis on breaking the grid for intentional imbalance.
Updated 4 days ago
Version 3.0
    • JodiSansone's avatar
      JodiSansone
      Community Member

      I've been playing with this for a couple weeks. My objective for this demo was to see if a custom style prompt in AI Assistant could generate a cohesive set of visuals for a project. David Anderson did a video on this a couple weeks ago and I wanted to try it. I took inspiration from artwork by Malcolm Liepke. I created a custom prompt describing his style and then used it to generate visuals of people, places and backgrounds--things I would expect to use in a client project.  I think AI Assistant did a good job of giving me consistency in the look and feel of the visuals, but couldn't re-create Liepke's style. Those pesky artists are too creative! One thing that would be great in AI visual generators would be if you could insert a color hexcode and have that color show up in the images. I had some specific hexcodes that I wanted to use and I could only approximate them.  

      • Jonathan_Hill's avatar
        Jonathan_Hill
        Super Hero

        This is cool, Jodi, and really thorough. I agree, it would be great if you could define the colour palette for the AI images. But the way you've presented the image and prompt alongside each other provides a useful window on the process of creating this style guide.

        Might have to pick your brains on some of the finer points of this demo when I see you at DevLearn 😀

  • Hello!

    This week I'm exploring the Gutenberg Rule with Officer Mahoney!

    https://bit.ly/elhc481 

    And yes, this is a 𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 joke, but it's solid advice that I have followed for years.

    • JodiSansone's avatar
      JodiSansone
      Community Member

      Hi Jonathan, Can you check your bitly link? I wasn't able to open your project. Would love to see it. 

    • JodiSansone's avatar
      JodiSansone
      Community Member

      Cringe joke but good advice. I didn't realize that pattern had a name. 

  • Bonjour Heroes.
    Ho! I'm surprised to be only the third on this Wednesday. Was it a bit difficult? For me: Pfff! What a complicated job to put it all together. 
    I was counting on the good advices and demonstrations of the other heroes, and then suggested... that you practice and create a screen yourself. 

    https://360.articulate.com/review/content/9077cdb7-16dd-4144-8b1a-cf5267a8f724/review
    Here's a setup for assembling the elements of a fictitious training course launch screen, trying out different backgrounds, different fonts, different font colors, moving some elements around, and putting it all together to make a coherent whole (or not).
    You may also be interested in the Javascript code used to change font colors directly.
    If you get a good result (or not), don't hesitate to leave a comment in the Review with your final screen.
    The .story file is attached to the Review.

    • JodiSansone's avatar
      JodiSansone
      Community Member

      Hi Thierry, I enjoyed having the freedom to change the colors and the background. I spent a lot of time experimenting!