Every project needs a brainstorming session about its graphic look and feel—even if that assessment does no more than establish that your project will have the exact same look as the nine other projects that proceeded it. In such cases, you may not partake in a treatment meeting per se, but treatment is an agenda item of another project startup meeting.

Art Director, project manager, instructional, graphic, software designers, content developers and artists make up the team. Even if you are a team of one—hold a session for yourself anyway. Treat yourself to the requisite finger food and beverage...and mentally kick around ideas about the look and feel that your instructional piece will have.

Coming up with relevant treatments, rather than just fanciful ideas, depends upon the information you discover or decide about the goals of the piece and the learning landscape. These are introduced in Chapter Two and further elaborated in Chapter Sixteen.

After the treatment meeting, you usually have a pretty distinct direction for how you want to position the graphic approach. But there are also some comparatively mundane items such as access to ancillary materials (glossary, references, help); typeface (or font) selections for text, page, slide, or screen numbering conventions; and so forth that you still need to consider before you begin drafting image and style ideas for the client. In agencies, the choices about graphic look and feel are sometimes formalized in a document known as a "design brief" or treatment document.

Clark (2003), describes the following four instructional strategies: receptive, directive, guided discovery, and exploratory. Each translates to a different type of structure and visual approach in order to support the strategy. In e-learning especially, the display design is inextricably linked to the instructional strategy. Table 17.1 recaps the four strategies and the implications of each for the visual approach.

Figures 17.1 through 17.4 illustrate the different display frameworks for each of the four strategies for a small course about flower formation. In Figure 17.1, the receptive strategy, which views the learner as a passive vessel, employs a video tour through a rose garden with a narrator providing the explanatory information. In Figure 17.2, the directive strategy relies on a standard online learning format that includes presentation of definitions or steps followed by examples and practice. In Figure 17.3, the guided discovery strategy promotes a problem-centered learning environment. To support this intent, the visual approach suggests three-dimensionality and incorporates modeled and photographic images. Guided discovery multimedia often employ such a "real-world" graphic look to simulate on-the-job circumstances. Finally, in Figure 17.4, the exploratory treatment of the same content uses a straightforward nested menu display framework that allows the learner access to any material at any time.

Figure 17.1. A Receptive Instructional Strategy.

Figure 17.2. A Directive Instructional Strategy.

Figure 17.3. A Guided Discovery Instructional Strategy.

Figure 17.4. An Exploratory Instructional Strategy.

In training materials, either words or visuals carry the training story line and dominate the layout. As the learners move from page to page to page, they know where to look to follow the story line. As long as the "thread" remains constant throughout the instructional unit, there is no extra load for the learners. But if the design is schizophrenic, with competing emphasis for audio, text, graphics, and even animation, the experience is chaotic and not conducive to learning.

As a simple illustration, consider children's books. Picture books use graphics to tell the story, so that the child can literally decipher what happens by following the illustrations, even though there may be text on each page that also provides the message. The graphics have primacy in the visual approach and are dominant. The e-learning course shown in Figure 17.5 is graphics-dominant. The pictures carry the story line, and the text is subordinate, often only in speech balloons or integrated into the graphic.

Figure 17.5. A Graphics-Dominant Instructional Screen.

Figure 17.6. A Text-Dominant Instructional Screen.

Many books for adolescents and adults, however, tend to be text-dominant. The text often starts in the upper-left-hand corner on every page, a consistent and pre-eminent location used to make following the continuity of the story line easy. Pictures are often smaller and less emphatic. They have a supportive role. Figure 17.6 shows a text-dominant instructional piece.

As you plan your visual approach, you decide what element carries or drives the story line. Naturally, you decide based on the content, the audience, the learning environment, the platform, all those issues you investigated and determined during assessment and analysis. Decisions about which is dominant determines placement of graphics and the real estate designated to other components. In text-dominant courses, more prime real estate space is dedicated to text. The converse is true for graphics-dominant courses.

Figure 17.7. A Graphics-Dominant Brochure on Skin Cancer.

To elaborate, look at the layouts in Figures 17.7 and 17.8. These two print-based visual approaches for instruction are aimed at high-risk patients so that they can recognize skin conditions they should contact their doctor about immediately. Photographs of different cancers with defining characteristics in labels can almost carry the training without much explanatory text. The graphics-dominant layout in Figure 17.7 puts many graphics in prime locations, with only essential text below in less prime real estate. The eye starts with the graphics, which can carry the message and can communicate the essential information for the intended audience. The text-dominant version in Figure 17.8, though the same type of three-panel brochure, allocates the prime real estate to explanatory text, forcing the graphics to a less prime spot.

Figure 17.8. A Text-Dominant Brochure on Skin Cancer.

There is also less room for the graphics, a poor design decision, for these are really the essential components of this concept-based instruction.

To help determine if your instructional content is a good candidate for a graphics-driven layout, use the checklist in Table 17.2. If you answer five or six of the questions in this checklist with a "yes," your content may be a candidate for a layout that lets the picture tell the story.

Hand-in-hand with deciding whether text or graphics drive the layout is the decision about the size of the finished product. For both paper-based and e-learning packages, decisions about the size and orientation of product are critical to its look and feel. The size of the final product may also have the most far-reaching impact on the design and selection of individual graphics. Will the book be standard 8 ½ × 11? 5 × 4? Landscape? Portrait? In e-learning, should the "page" be fixed to fit completely in the display window or extend beyond it and require vertical scrolling? Some minimal vertical scrolling is considered okay; horizontal scrolling is less acceptable; and requiring both puts an extra burden on your learner (Lyons and Clark, 1999).

Obviously, size and orientation must meet the requirements of the learning environment and the learner profile. Consider the step-by-step instruction for clearing a paper jam in the office copier. The size needs to be small enough to access while attempting to clear the copier, but large enough to accommodate legible illustrations. If designed by the equipment manufacturer, the instructions can be an integral part of the machine, or on a control panel display, or even on decals inside the various parts of the machine. But if not, the size and orientation decisions need to take in consideration where the machine is located and how instructional materials can be kept with the machine. As one solution, perhaps you create a 5- × 4-inch landscape booklet that is stored in a pouch affixed to the side of the machine.

Sometimes you don't have much control over the visual style of a piece. Perhaps your work is tightly controlled by corporate standards. Maybe other times the style of your instruction is wide open to all the creativity that the design team can bring to the project. The graphic style is often one of the chief tools for conveying the image sought. All visual elements contribute.

If you want to learn more about the elements of style, consider taking any of a number of seminars offered by the resources listed in Chapter Sixteen, or even enroll in art history, painting, or advertising design classes.

As you develop the style of the piece, keep in mind the cognitive principles for directing attention, managing load, and helping learners build mental models as these may provide guidance on how you use and position your elements.

Available real estate refers to the amount of space that needs to be reserved for instructional content, before space is allocated to navigational elements, decorative graphics, and theme treatment. Even though at this point it is too soon to be determining the exact layout of every page or screen in the product, you are making decisions about the general pattern for the components of your display. Where do the standard graphics go? How should the running organizational graphic be handled? Should a book's standard layout be a two-page spread to accommodate a graphics-dominant display?

These decisions become key development efficiencies in later phases of design and development. In e-learning, for example, the graphics and programming teams often develop templates that provide designers and writers guidelines on how much text will fit on various screen types. In some cases, these guidelines establish the maximum number of characters per line as well as the maximum number of lines per column. Some very restrictive e-learning courses allow only relatively small graphics and only in the upper-right corner of the display. Other courses provide many more options.

Graphics are seductive in their own right, and the tendency sometimes is to designate more real estate to them, leaving less for what sometimes seems to be dull text or a boring chart or table. As happens all too frequently, an artist can create a display framework that doesn't leave enough available space for instruction and instructional graphics.

Although this tendency to leave little room for instruction is especially evident with ornate theme graphics, the screen capture in Figure 17.9 illustrates that even the most basic courses can make the mistake of emphasizing a gratuitous graphic and relegating the instructional content to a corner.

Figure 17.9. A Gratuitous Graphic Monopolizes the Screen.

But it is not just e-learning or slideshow presentations that suffer from this problem. Often designers of paper-based materials paint themselves into the same corner. Consider Figure 17.10, which shows an example of a Quick Reference Card for clearing paper jams. Here, the graphics tell the story, but the display design leaves very little space for a series of illustrations, especially for the three in the left-hand column. The available space for graphics is too limited. Thus, the illustrations are squeezed down to the smallest size possible. Three sets of instruction in three separate columns are jammed onto one page. Solution? More pages, bigger illustrations, and line art instead of photographs.

Figure 17.10. A Poor Use of Real Estate for the Instructional Purpose.

As you or the artists are roughing out the layout, you address the need for navigational elements that help learners move through the training. Navigational graphics let learners know where they are, where they have been, and where they can go (Nielsen, 2000). In a book, these graphics may be section and chapter indicators, page number, or header and footer. Navigation can be the tabs on a quick reference card or even the graphic chapter identifiers in a book.

For e-learning and multimedia design, the navigational elements of the display framework are often, but not always, more elaborate than those used in print. Learners need to know where to click to go forward or back through an instructional chunk. They need to know how to jump to another segment, access a glossary, and find adjunct samples and research. If the e-learning provides an on-screen agent or coach, the learner needs an icon or visible device to access it. Although in most cases, these navigational elements should be readily accessible, they need to recede visually so as not to distract from the instructional content.

Good interface design is a discipline unto itself and beyond the scope of this book. Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity is the current de facto standard for good interface design, but there are several other key books and seminars on the subject. Suffice it to say here, however, that for every function the designers anticipate the learner performing, space in the design needs to be reserved for a button, icon, and navigational identifier to let them do so. At the same time, the display framework must support the training.

The visual approach you determine sets the backdrop for your content and any individual graphics your lessons require. Once the backdrop is set, you and the team know the parameters and limitations against which you have to work. In the next chapter, we take a look at how to get the creative juices flowing as you delve into the specifics of planning the design for your individual content graphics. Some of these techniques are good data collection techniques or spring from the content types themselves. Others involve honing a new awareness of visual techniques.