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Rachel Allen Dillon

Five Graphic Design Tips for Instructional Designers

Think of these graphic design tips as a mini checklist before submitting your first draft.

1) Give your objects and text breathing room, add margins if you place text in shapes, add leading, which is space between sentences so that bulleted lists aren’t scrunched near each other.


2) If you can’t see at a glance what you want to be the most important take away, then you need to add contrast. Make it larger, change the color or use line to draw attention to it.


3) Use your gridlines or guides to make sure your text boxes or graphics align with something and aren’t floating like a molecule.


4) Timing matters. In video, in web-based training, in PPPs, if there is going to be a lot on a slide or screen, which is sometimes unavoidable, release it a little bit at a time so the brain can process the information and build on the message.


5) Design shouldn't be boring. Let the content inspire graphic choices, photos and line art. Step back and look at the experience as a whole story. There should be consistency with the colors in the photos, the type of line art that is chosen, the font hierarchy; they should look like they’re in the same family, like they’re related.

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Ruby Jackson
Ruby Jackson
Jan 23, 2023

Rachel, your layout is definitely beneficial for a newbie in the ID field, it helps to have a foundation of a blank slate that offers the right set up. While thinking of projects I'll be working on for various companies, the first step you mention brings to mind somewhat of an outline that would normally describe the plan for a research paper. I appreciate the details of margins, space for text and objects to ensure I have a blueprint of what the big picture will entail for the learners I am targeting. In the MS ID course I am attending, we discussed the need of identifying the learning theory that most closely relates to our approach of intaking and storing…


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