Lauren's Brochure Draft

I do not have a company/reason to create a brochure currently, so my old roommate who works in Johnson & Johnson's fitness center sent me some of their old ones.  I recreated their personal training brochure.  It was nice, but had a lot of redundant text...

 (original)

I started by creating a new color palette.  I wanted to keep the red to match the logo and then chose a more muted blue and yellow to compliment it.

I chose to use a gate fold to be a little different. 


Outside- 

The barbell on the cover is flush to the center fold so that it will connect when closed.  The blue banner on the back is as well.

Inside- 

What do you guys think about the colors?  

Is there still too much text?  

Do you think that it is chunked well or is it hard to follow? 

I'm open to any suggestions, thanks!

Solving Problems and Mapping Toast

Found a great TED talk that deals with mapping from a systems engineering standpoint.  That and it also shows how to make toast.  Check it out here: http://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_got_a_wicked_problem_first_tell_me_how_you_make_toast

Learn to practice your visual thinking skills....

Here is a post on a blog I follow that I thought applied directly to this class.

How to Practice Visual Thinking Skills & Apply Them to E-Learning

March 10th, 2015

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In a previous post, we discussed visual thinking concepts and where they fit with elearning design. Now, let’s look at ways to practice sketching your ideas so that you’re able to move past understanding the concepts and actually applying them to your course.

How to Practice Your Visual Thinking Skills

The first step is to get a handle on the basics:

• Learn to capture concepts using Roam’s visual grammar or Gray’s approach to visualizing ideas.
• Become fluent with your visual alphabet and the basic shapes used as building blocks. This helps you see the basic shapes in the objects you want to create.

• Practice using the basic shapes to create specific objects. The more you practice the better you’ll become at seeing the shapes and sketching something that looks like what it’s supposed to be.

Practice Activities for Visual Thinking Skills

Some people have innate skills and sketching isn’t too hard to start. But many don’t have those skills and feel like they can’t do it. But they can. A key point is to feel comfortable sketching.

Remember, this isn’t about becoming a graphics design professional. You want to get a feel for the flow of drawing with your pen, especially if you’re using a computer or tablet. Then develop some fluency and clarity. And that will take a little practice.

Here are some practice activities.

Activity 1: Create basic shapes over and over again.

Work on getting lines straight and completing the desired shape in less strokes. Can you create the shape in one movement and still have it look like it’s supposed to? For example, I notice that if I create a triangle really fast, then the sides start to bow in. However, if I am more deliberate my lines remain straight. The goal is to get straighter lines at a faster speed. A circle should like a circle and not a blob.

Activity 2: Creating common objects.

Look around your office and identify 10 random objects. Break them down by the basic shapes and then create them a few times. For example, here’s a quick sketch of my desk. It’s mostly rectangles and a few circles.

Another thing is to recognize what makes the shape unique and identifiable. For example, an elephant stands out because of the trunk and large ears. By focusing on the essential shapes you can convey the idea of an elephant without having to create the entire thing.

Activity 3: Convey concepts with your objects.

Start to practice sketching whole ideas. Identify three TED videos and capture the core concepts as sketches. It may be easier to just start with three main ideas from each video. Or if that is too much, just focus on a single point. The good thing about video is that you can pause it and rewind. Here are three to help you get started:

• How to Save the World from Bad Meetings
• What We’re Learning About Online Education
• Simple Power of Handwashing

Activity 4: Improve your penmanship.

Sunni Brown has some good advice in her book Doodle Revolution where she says to trace over letters. Find a font type you like and type out the ABCs and save as an image. Then load the image into your drawing app and practice tracing over the letters. Eventually you’ll develop the muscle memory to create nice legible handwriting for your sketches.

When I was a Finance Specialist in the Army we were taught to use block letters so that our writing was more legible. To this day, I still do a lot of printing with block letters and it helps when I write, especially smaller text.

Examples of Visual Thinking Skills in E-Learning

Here are a three examples of people who do a great job sketching their ideas and are part of our industry. They also offer tips via twitter and their blogs.

• Kevin Thorn of NuggetHead Studioz. I ran into Kevin at Devlearn. He showed me his sketch note of the Neil deGrasse Tyson keynote. Obviously we don’t all have Kevin’s innate drawing skills, but if you look past the drawings it’s mostly print and a few basic shapes. Kevin offers some tips on creating your own sketched objects in between fulfilling his pro wrestling obligations.

• Blair Rorani of Ever Learning. Last year in Australia, Blair live sketched my presentation which I noted in this post on instructional design challenges. Blair also offers a lot of useful tips on his site’s academy.

• John Curran of Designed for Learning. I love John’s sketches. Again, they’re not overly complicated to create, but they convey good information and the hand drawn style creates enough contrast to engage people visually.

The key in all of this isn’t to become a pro graphic designer. Instead it’s learning to think visually. Elearning is a mostly visual medium and anything we can do to better communicate our ideas will only serve to make the courses we create better.
Note: I usually only post on Tuesdays. However, I’ve been getting a lot of request for more tutorials. So I’m thinking of doing a Thursday post. Let me know what you think in the comments.

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The Rapid E-Learning Blog shares practical tips & tricks to help you become a rapid elearning pro.

It is hosted by
Tom Kuhlmann who has over 20 years of hands-on experience in the training industry and currently runs the community at Articulate.

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