April 17th, 2012
At a previous workshop someone wanted to see how this was done so we created one quickly in class. I like to do these templates because they help bring out a few ideas.
Ideas to Inspire Your CreativityMost of us aren’t graphic designers and we struggle to come up with a nice looking design. One way to work around that is to be inspired by those who have graphic design skills.
As a habit, I like to review website designs for ideas. I learn a lot about layouts and how the designer is using color. I can apply these ideas to my elearning courses because when it comes down to it, a web pages and elearning screens are going to have the same visual elements like text, objects, colors, and pictures.
Develop Technical ProficiencyI’ve shared many templates and illustration ideas over the past few years. While the actual templates work for some of your projects, the main point is less about the actual output and more about developing technical proficiency with the tools you have. In this case, I mostly use PowerPoint.
With each template I try to reinforce some design ideas and techniques that you can use in PowerPoint to create your own templates or illustrations. If you can use the ones I give away, that’s cool. But hopefully you’ll take the time to practice some of the techniques so that you develop more proficient skills in PowerPoint.
Here’s a template we built in the workshop. The inspiration came from a template we quickly found on the template monster website.
PowerPoint Production TipsHere’s an example of the template in action. If you want to use it, you can download it here.
Create textured backgrounds by layering transparent images. Create shapes and fill them with gradients, colors, or patterns. Then vary their transparency. Sit them on top of each other and you can create all sorts of effects.