233 TIPS ON GRAPHICS AND VISUAL DESIGN If you have a busy background, put a color stroke around any text you have. The stroke color should be a high-contrast color of the text—for example, light blue text with a very dark blue stroke. This will reduce eye fatigue for your learners. Phil Cowcill, Canada Department of National Defence Almost every image search engine, from Google to Flickr and others, includes a mechanism to search for content that is public domain, Creative Commons licensed, or otherwise available freely for commercial use. For Creative Commons, it is often as simple as giving attribution to the creator (read the license restrictions for details). But, while this content is free, it isn’t useless, bad, or low-quality. Some of it is exceptional. Some of it can inspire you. Some of it can be reused or edited in ways that enable your training content to succeed. So, even without a budget, you can obtain some exceptional graphics. If you do have a graphics budget or a person or department behind you, you can often find placeholder images that give your graphic creators a strong foundation from which to create your final image. By starting with a great placeholder, you can save yourself and them unnecessary round trips as they try to decipher your graphic needs. Bill Sawyer If you are animating text, don’t use SVG graphics. This requires a fair bit of processing. Use a PNG graphic instead. While the PNG file size is larger and will pixelate if you zoom in, it can be animated much more easily. Phil Cowcill, Canada Department of National Defence I created a resource for non–instructional designers to help them add some visual appeal to their documents. These are primarily procedural how-to guides. I call this document a “snippets page” because graphics can be copied and pasted to the document. Microsoft Word and PowerPoint have some really good graphic design capabilities that I feel do the job and are accessible to most people who do not possess advanced technical abilities. Elaine Glick, HCA 33 www.eLearningGuild.com