233 TIPS ON GRAPHICS AND VISUAL DESIGN Use colors with effectiveness! Georgia O’Keeffe said, “I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way—things that I had no words for.” Colors have common associations, although they vary culture by culture: • Orange symbolizes energy. It’s an ideal color for eLearning if you want to spark emotions, adventure, and excitement. • Blue keeps calm and serenity and can evoke reliability, authority, and loyalty. • Yellow is associated with optimism and happiness. It’s an excellent choice for eLearning courses requiring a little more, such as modules for a monotonous legal or financial subject. • Red symbolizes urgency, passion, and excitement, too. It attracts attention, so it is perfect for navigation icons, essential instructions, and other important eLearning course elements. • Green symbolizes vitality, life, and personal growth. It’s a good color for business training courses designed to increase a company’s profits; dollars are green! • Rose evokes peace, compassion, and love. It is the color of femininity and understanding. But, as with the green, everything is in the shade. • Violet symbolizes royalty, intrigue, and spirituality; it’s an eye-catching color that can surprise and attract the attention of the learner. It can accentuate an element to draw attention. • Brown is associated with nature, simplicity, honesty, and reliability. It’s perfect for simple and direct eLearning courses because it does not distract the learner from the main subject or tasks. Pierre Hauert, OTONA SA Take care to make your visuals reflect the content you are serving your learners and the context in which you’re having them learn it. Too often, we see eLearning that looks wonderful but is all style and little substance. Focus on the content you are including, then choose images and other visuals that reflect the content. For example, it’s no use to have content focused on handling chemicals correctly and then use visuals of people sitting in boardrooms or artistically beautiful abstract art. There’s nothing wrong with using beautiful imagery as long as it doesn’t overpower the content itself, especially if it helps further highlight the content. Let’s say that you are having airport gate agents learn best practices in dealing with difficult passengers. Do you want your learners to feel as if they were at a real airport gate as much as possible, making it easier for them to remember the right steps to take when they are on the job? Take good-quality photos or have someone draw a high-quality image of the setting. Keep the rest of the screen nice but simple. Alternatively, you’d be better off having the gate agent and customer on screen in a completely empty room with nondescript white walls and an airport gate counter between them. This has been shown to work very effectively, even when there is no imagery around the people and counter. Why? The learner’s eyes won’t wander to look at the pretty border or awesome background image. Learners will focus on the only screen elements they can: the actual content. I’m not suggesting that a bare white room is better than imagery that reflects the place in question. Rather, I’m saying that it works better than images that do not acclimate learners to the location in which they’ll be doing their jobs. Remember: Focus on content first, then on the rest. Images, navigation buttons, audio, video—all should help with, not detract from, learning. Joe Ganci, eLearningJoe 38 www.eLearningGuild.com