eLearning Design: 5 Graphic Design Tips for eLearning Professionals

You’ve spent countless hours of time crafting the best eLearning course possible. It has excellent course material, valuable exercises, and is extremely well-organized and coherent.

Now, it’s time to launch, right?

Well, not so fast. Many eLearning professionals spend so much time crafting their course, that they forget to put any effort into graphic design.

Paying little attention to graphic design is a huge mistake.

The right graphic design helps learners with navigation, improves readability, and creates focal points.

If you want to create a truly effective learning experience for your users, check out these eLearning design tips.

1. Focus on Focal Points

Drawing attention to main ideas and key learning components is the ultimate goal with graphic design.

Each page of your course should contain prominent elements that learners can easily identify.

Strategically designed focal points can help you emphasize these prominent elements. For example, you could bold important text or switch it to an eye-catching color that is different than the rest of the page’s font. Or, you could frame it with a decorative border or place it at the top of the page.

Keep in mind, changing the graphics of your text should serve to showcase important elements, not distract from them.

2. Focus on Simplicity to Create Harmony

If you’re new to graphic design, it can be easy to get carried away with all the different elements available.

However, while it can be fun to play around with these elements, you should try to stick with a specific style and color palette. Too many elements can cause chaos and confuse your learner. For example, Torch Learning Management System mainly uses the color orange, making for a clean design.

Also, don’t fear white space. Even though you have a lot of information to share, cramming it all into one page won’t help the learner. Appropriate amounts of white space will help keep the learner from feeling overloaded with information.

Creating order and harmony with your graphic design elements will make it easier for your learners to glide through the material.

3. Design for Your Audience

When creating your eLearning design, always remember to keep your audience in mind.

For example, if the course is for children, you’ll want to incorporate bright colors and big fonts (like a children’s book) and super easy navigation.

If the course is for professional coders, you can probably keep the fancy graphics to a minimum.

4. Focus on Readability with Fonts

It can be tempting to choose a super unique font to stand out from the crowd.

But, think about your font choice from the learner’s perspective. Remember, they’re going to be doing a lot of reading, so you want to make sure to select a font that is clean, crisp, and easy on the eyes.

Save any fancy fonts and texts for titles or words that you particularly want to emphasize.

5. Stay Current

You don’t want your learners to feel like they’re learning outdated information.

You want to make them feel like they’re learning information that is valuable now and for years to come.

In order to do this, make sure the eLearning design elements you incorporate appeal to modern users. Nothing says cheap and outdated like a 90s style design.

Keep an eye out for design trends on big sites that users are familiar with like Google, Twitter, and Facebook. Then, incorporate them where you see fit.