I’ve been looking at a few examples of in-house e-learning content in the past week ot two, in each case developed by relatively novice designers. What struck me was that, although they had some good content and reasonably challenging interactions, they really didn’t look very nice at all!
Now I know that in previous postings I’ve gone on about the fact that Hollywood production values are neither necessary nor obtainable, but there are some minimum standards of layout and design which certainly are desirable and achievable:
- Good practice in terms of colour schemes, layout, navigational devices, typography, etc.
- A consistency in the application of the above.
There are two ways that in-house designers can improve the graphical design of their programmes:
- Buy a good book on the subject (say Connie Malamed’s Visual Language for Designers or Timothy Samara’s Design elements – a graphic style manual) and then try to put into practice what you read.
- Employ a graphic designer to establish a look and feel that can be applied to all future programmes, and then encapsulate this in a style guide which includes templates for all common screen types.
The former is certainly cheaper and could work, although there’s always a danger that you will struggle to convert theory into practice. The latter takes a little more time and money but, assuming you can find a suitable designer who has experience of e-learning graphics (or at least web design), is a one-off investment that could pay off for years to come. Graphic designers are not that expensive and work quickly – this is unlikely to be a significant sum of money.
Unless you’ve got an eye for graphic design, in which case you’ve probably already lost interest in this post, I’d go for bringingn in the graphic designer. Sometimes doing-it-yourself is a false economy.