Using Visual Communication Skills to Succeed in Your Instructional Design Career

Instructional designers are frequently expected to create learning materials such as infographics and presentations to convey instructional messages, making visual communication skills crucial in their careers (Ervine, 2016; Kuba & Jeong, 2023). In addition, visual communication is among the top five skills for instructional designers in higher education. Sub-skills such as design principles and media creation are ranked the highest on a scale from unnecessary to essential. Further, the shape of education has changed in recent years due to concerns about Covid-19, which required many classes and educators to switch to a distance learning format, making the production of visuals a critical skill (Global Industry Analysts, 2021). Both academics and instructional designers in the industry must possess visual communication skills to keep up with the changes, as they will be required to interpret, use, and produce information that is presented visually (Ariga et al., 2016).

Fortunately, visual communication skills—such as creating visuals—are learnable, teachable, and capable of development (Avgerinou & Pettersson, 2020). With that in mind, in this chapter, we discuss visual skills divided into two parts: creating visuals for learning and showcasing your work and skills. After Part 1, you will see a learning check to help you evaluate your understanding. Also, throughout the chapter, you can follow my steps in creating and publishing a design. Or, if you want to be a step ahead, you can create your own design.

Part 1: Creating Visuals for Learning

Understanding Brand Style Guides

As instructional designers, we must support organizations in translating business goals into consistent messages that are both verbally and visually consistent with the organization’s values. Thus, you should always ask your client or organization for their brand style guide to comprehend how they communicate visually. Brand style guides are instructional manuals that help designers communicate a consistent brand and message and save time in decisions regarding fonts, colors, and images to use. Understanding brand style guides is crucial for creating visually customized learning assets for a particular audience. Also, creating personalized materials for your clients helps you earn their buy-in since you demonstrate that their project is unique.

If your organization or client has a complete brand style guide, consider yourself lucky! You just saved a lot of time. The brand style guide will include specifications on colors, fonts, and graphics the organization wants designers to use and will likely include several examples of how their specifications can be applied to different designs. That means you do not have to test different fonts or create a color palette. However, what if the organization does not have a brand style guide? You might have to do a little research. For instance, you can analyze their social media pages, websites, and marketing advertisements to check the most used colors (e.g., Are the designs mostly monochromatic or do they have more than one color?), font types (e.g., Do they use serif or sans serif? Is there a combination of different fonts?), and graphics (e.g., Do they use icons? What the icons look like?).

Besides accessing or creating a brand style guide, the following are some guidelines for creating effective visuals:

1. Apply the branding colors as design accents. You can create customized icons using the branding colors. Figure 1 shows examples of the same icons customized with different color pallets.
2. Personalize a stock image. You can apply the brand color to images, such as changing the color of a person’s shirt or an object to match the brand color (there are many tutorials online on changing shirt colors). Remember to also check the colors of the company’s competitors to avoid using them.
3. Check color usage in different designs. If not stated in the brand guide, check previous visual communication products to see how designers applied the brand colors. For example, Google and Slack have five core brand colors each, but Google mainly uses grayscale shades and one core color in its products while Slack combines multiple brand colors to compose colorful and bright designs.
4. Evaluate when to use the brand colors. For example, in the mini-case study above, the organization’s voice was defined as enthusiastic and cheerful. In their instructional materials about defensive driving, we opted to use grayscale for images that had a negative feel (e.g., car accidents) and only used their colors to communicate positive messages.

Design Challenge – Part 1 of 4: Creating Customized Icons

Scenario: Imagine your team at your university is presenting a talk on the CRAP design principles (i.e., contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity; Williams, 2008) and you are tasked with creating a takeaway infographic with a summary of the CRAP principles.

In this first part, we will begin with creating customized icons. You can use this file containing four icons to customize the icons. Try creating different options. If you need ideas, watch the video below on styling icons in PowerPoint.

Here are some points to consider: 

• What are the branding colors of your university?
• Do they have more than one color? If so, which one is more prevalent?
• How are colors used? Are the designs more colorful or mostly grayscale?

Applying the CRAP Principles to Create Visuals

Contrast

Contrast refers to the arrangement of opposing elements in a composition that draws viewers’ attention to specific parts (Lauer & Pentak, 2012; Williams, 2008). In instructional materials, we apply contrast to establish a visual hierarchy based on the function and importance of content. For example, in Figure 2, the designer established visual hierarchy by using bolded letters only in the title and subtitles, using a bigger font size for the title and subtitles, adding white space around the main title, coloring the title and subtitles, and adding bullet points to differentiate the two examples from the description.

Below are some features you should always consider when styling titles, subtitles, and paragraphs to create contrasting characteristics and enhance the content structure:

• Font weight: Use bolded letters to highlight key content. Studies have shown that bolding letters to emphasize keywords helps learners remember the important content (Jin, 2013).
• Font size: Use different font sizes to inform learners of titles’ and subtitles’ levels. Making a clear distinction between the hierarchy of content helps learners comprehend the content structure and build a better conceptual schema.
• Font case: Apply uppercase letters to main titles to enhance the visual hierarchy.
• White space: Place white space around the main title or key sentences to help them stand out and draw in the viewer’s attention.
• Colors: Apply color to the titles and subtitles. You can use the colors of your organization’s brand to strengthen and connect your design to the brand.
• Shapes: You can also place small shapes close to key content to make them stand out and direct the reading flow.

Moreover, you can apply more features to important content, as the designer made in Figure 3: creating a clear hierarchy that starts from the main title to subtitles, key phrase, description, and bullet points. The main title uses five features: bolded letters, large-size font, upper case letters, white space, color, and a graphic element. The subtitle uses fewer features than the title, and the key phrase uses bolded letters and a light gray rectangular box. In contrast, the paragraph style for the body of the text is the simplest, smaller font, less white space around it, and with no color or shape.

Alignment and Proximity

The alignment principle helps designers arrange elements in a composition to create a sense of equilibrium and organization and improve the readability of the design (Lauer & Pentak, 2012). For informative materials, such as instructional assets, building a modular grid is an effective way to support alignment, structure, and organization. A modular grid is a set of intersecting vertical and horizontal lines that structures a layout and facilitates the arrangement of elements (Timothy, 2017). Grids help designers organize content and make slides uniform while providing flexibility to generate various layouts (Kuba, 2021). The modular grid is the most relevant grid for instructional materials and includes four parameters (see Figure 4):

1. Margins: the invisible frame around the content that creates a safe and breathable space around the design (Kuba & Jeong, 2023). I recommend always defining your margins before placing and arranging elements in your composition. By setting margins early on, you can know the actual space you have to work on and avoid future adjustments.
2. Columns: the vertical divisions inside the margins that organize and contain the content. You can define the number of columns and rows based on the content. For example, if you have content with four subtopics, you can create a modular grid of two columns by two rows, or four columns, etc.
3. Rows and Baselines: the horizontal divisions and lines inside the margins that organize and align elements
4. Gutters: the space between columns that can create meaningful subgroups. For example, in Figure 5, we can clearly see four takeaway points (i.e., even if the text was not readable, we would still be able to recognize the content structure of four sub-groups).

A grid can also support the proximity principle, which states that elements close to each other are perceived as related, and elements that are spaced apart are perceived as unrelated (Kuba et al., 2022; Lauer & Pentak, 2012; Mayer, 2017). For example, in Figure 5, I created a 4x3 (column x row) grid and placed the title and image on a spatial zone of one row and four columns and each takeaway point in one column. Thus, by positioning the tile in a large spatial zone (i.e., with bigger white space around it), I created a clear distinction between the title and body of text as they appear spaced apart. Also, the gutters support the proximity principle by distancing subgroups to make them visually noticeable, thereby improving the reading flow.

In sum, grids are handy for aligning elements, providing flexibility to create different designs, and helping maintain consistent designs. They are also particularly useful when multiple designers are working on the same project. For instance, using the same modular grid, you can create different layouts to inform learners of the structure of the lessons (e.g., one layout for the learning objectives, one for the content, and another for the takeaway points; see Figure 6).

Repetition

Repetition helps designers create unity and consistency within their design. The repetition principle states that elements that share similar characteristics are perceived as related, while a lack of pattern indicates that they are unrelated (Lauer & Pentak, 2012; Williams, 2008). There are two common strategies regarding the repetition principle:

1. Apply the same characteristics to elements with the same function and hierarchy. For example, in Figure 7, the designer repeated the purple color to all subtitles and icons and added numbers with the same formatting for all sub-groups.
2. Apply the same characteristics to related content. For instance, in Figure 8, the designer used the same color for each group of content (e.g., all contrast elements are purple) and repeated the same style (e.g., use of boxes) and visual structure (e.g., subtitles under icons) for each group.

You can also use the repetition principle to help learners better understand the organization of a lesson. For instance, you can create diverse graphic elements for different purposes (Figure 9). Also, the suggestion of creating specific layouts for the learning objectives, content, and takeaway slides is an example of the repetition principle applied across different lessons.

Part 2: Showcasing Your Work and Skills

Now that you have created an infographic, it is time to promote your work. If you do not have a portfolio, I highly recommend starting one. Building a portfolio is not an easy or quick task. For every project you complete, adding it to your portfolio is almost like a new project altogether. You must document and explain your design process concisely and showcase artifacts. In this section, we discuss techniques to promote your work and strategies to make your portfolio stand out.

Use Mockups to Showcase Your Work

Mockups are easy to find and easy to edit. They are high-fidelity prototypes containing a placeholder that allows you to upload your image or video and get a more professional look, even if you have basic skills in design software. Mockups are also a great technique to provide a tangible vision for your audience of what the design will look like on a table screen, smartphone, or printed material. That way, your client can see the full vision of your work, ensuring everyone is on the same page. Additionally, with so many free mockups available online, you can save time while preparing a high-fidelity prototype of your product.

Let’s see some examples:

1. Mockup pictures. Mockup pictures are usually vectors or PSD files. The latter is the easiest to use as you can open the file in Photoshop and add your work in a few clicks. For instance, once, I envisioned an app game and wanted to display my project in my portfolio. Instead of uploading images of the user interface, I downloaded mockup files that included the audience (i.e., kids) to present the app being used. The result is an image with a more professional look exhibiting the project in the right context (see Figure 10).
   

   

2. Video promo mockups. The video below was created on a ready-to-use After Effects mockup and shows examples of SCORMs designed in Storyline. The viewers can see how the interactivities look for the end user, so these are thus serving as high-fidelity prototypes. Although the mockup included various scenes with placeholders, you might need some basic understanding of timelines.
   
   Watch this video.

Documenting Your Design Process

Now that you have your infographic and a mockup of your infographic displayed on a tablet, the last step is to document your project in your portfolio. Having a well-documented portfolio is a great way to show potential clients or interviewers all your skills before they even talk to you. You likely will have 30 to 45 minutes during interviews, so use your portfolio as leverage to put you ahead of the game. Here are some tips:

• Describe your design process. I cannot count how many times I was asked in interviews to explain my design process. Describing your design process is a great way to show how you manage a project from start to finish. In your portfolio, you can cite design models, such as design thinking, SAM, and ADDIE to explain how you use them and demonstrate your understanding. One idea is to use the stages of the ADDIE model as your subheadings and explain your tasks under each stage. See one example here.
• Use keywords from job postings. Pay close attention to the requirements of job posts that you like and try using the keywords to make your portfolio more marketable. When I was looking for a full-time instructional design position in the industry, I saw requirements for adult learning theories, instructional models, needs analysis, and assessment strategies. Thus, I updated my portfolio to include descriptions of instructional strategies implemented based on diverse learning theories (see example), practices to understand the learners' needs (e.g., surveys and interviews with stakeholders), types of assessments, and snapshots of my design process (e.g., wireframes; visit here).
• Use the STAR method. The STAR method is a technique to tell your stories during interviews that can also help you in documenting your project. STAR is an acronym for Situation, Task, Action, and Result. In your documentation, give readers the context in which the project took place, the tasks and challenges that you engaged in (try describing your responsibilities, not the team’s), the actions and solutions (i.e., your design process), and the results and outcomes.

Practice Makes Progress

In recent conversations with graphic design colleagues, we agreed that there is no such thing as being born with talent. We all talked about the terrible projects we have done in our early careers and how visual communication skills are not a talent that you are born with or without, but rather a complex skill that needs continuous practice. Thus, to wrap up this chapter, I offer ideas to keep improving visual communication skills and include examples of work done in the early stage of my career to show the importance of practice.

List of practice activities:

• Find tutorials. Following tutorial videos is a great way to learn a new and specific skill, especially if you want to describe the skill in your portfolio. Click here to see the many personal projects I did just to learn a new skill.
• Replicate existing visuals. If you are not sure about which skill you want to learn or improve, you can find a visual you like and try to replicate it. Most likely, you will find yourself learning something new.
• Rethink existing projects. This can be more challenging, but it will surely boost your creativity. You can find a graphic, visualization, or any other visual and try to re-design it. Use the same content but try to propose something new. Another idea is to find different graphics and try to rebrand them, so they all look as if they belong to a set or a certain company.
• Engage in personal projects. Give yourself challenges. Create an online portfolio, an infographic about fun facts about you, a graphic about your favorite songs, a personal brand, or a poster about events, as an example.

Remember that studies have shown that visual communication skills are learnable, teachable, and capable of development (Avgerinou & Pettersson, 2020), and I can prove it. Below are two ugly projects I completed during the first year of my bachelor’s degree. It took me much practice to learn how to apply design principles effectively, and I am still learning. To this date, I still follow tutorials in my free time, I still save designs that I like to try replicating, and I am constantly engaging in personal projects as my portfolio is a work in progress.

I hope the tips in this chapter help instructional designers better connect with their clients and jobs and produce more attractive and effective visuals for learning.