Creating course design comps

Now that we've defined our elements, we're ready to take those elements and arrange them to create our designs. For our course, we want a visually engaging design with consistent areas for text and images. We'll look at the visual part in a little bit. For now, let's focus on a layout structure.

One of the most common, and customizable, e-learning template designs is the RI-LT (Right Image - Left Text).

We can do just about anything with this layout. If we need more room for text, we'll scale the image down. If we need larger images, we can easily scale back the text. This is one of my favorite"go to" layouts when I don't have a lot of time.

Using the layout structure we just defined, we can begin working with those elements to come up with our overall course theme design.

In the last lesson, we walked through an exercise to help us define the common elements associated with our topic.

Most courses include similar visual components. Here are four of the most common:

  • Background image - this could be anything from a solid white image or an abstract, busy image.
  • Host or characters - the people in your course. Will they be illustrations? photos?
  • Design elements - objects related to the course topic
  • Text styles - heading 1, heading 2 and body text

Between the visual elements identified in the previous lesson and the common layout elements, we can begin working out some ideas for our course design.

What's next?

In the next lesson, we'll take a closer look at the background design used in the course.

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