CHAPTER 14

Graphics and Learning

By Connie Malamed

In This Chapter

•  What are the benefits of using graphics for learning?

•  What does the graphic planning process look like?

•  How do you select graphics?

•  How do you edit graphics?

•  Where do you place your graphics?

We are visual beings. For those who are sighted, the brain uses more resources for visual processing than for any other sense, more than hearing, smelling, and tasting. The optic nerve is packed with more than 1 million nerve fibers, taking in and sending information from the eyes to the brain. Most important to learning, we select and interpret this information without much conscious effort.

You may recall from chapter 9 that visuals in the video modality hold enormous power as a vehicle for learning. Perhaps that’s because seeing is believing. When a friend or co-worker finishes a fantastical story with “I saw it,” we tend to believe it. Going beyond video, this phenomenon lends itself to the believability of pictures, graphics, and the like. When we see a photograph in a newspaper or presentation slide, we believe the information to be more credible. Thus, adding relevant graphics to text-based learning content can strengthen the quality and effectiveness of your training programs.

Benefits of Graphics in Learning

Can you leverage the brain’s impressive visual capabilities to improve instructional materials? As you might expect, the answer is yes. In the following, you’ll discover five powerful benefits of using visuals in instructional materials, rather than using text alone.

Graphics Capture Attention

Gaining attention is one of the key ingredients of successful learning materials, and graphics are magnets for the eyes. Graphics draw the learner into your content. When looking at webpages, newspaper ads, and information brochures, readers tend to look at the pictures first. Think about the last time you were handed a workbook at a training program. While waiting for the session to kick off, you may have flipped through the workbook, zooming past pages of words. But when you came across a graphic, you stopped on that page to take a look. It stood out, whether it was an image, diagram, chart, or photograph.

Graphics Communicate Quickly

When compared with words alone, graphics are processed more quickly. Words must be read in a serial fashion, one after the other. In contrast, when you first look at a picture, you see it as one entity. If the graphic is effective, this holistic perception quickly gives you a sense of what the image is about.

Certain types of graphics communicate information more quickly than others. Icons, symbols, and silhouettes are reduced to the bare minimum of visual features necessary to be understood quickly.

Relevant Graphics Enhance Recall

When people encode information into memory, they often remember the text along with the meaningful pictures that accompany it. Remembering pictures and text together can aid the recall of information. Graphics may provide another communication channel and an additional connection for storing information in memory.

Graphics Improve Comprehension

Visuals have been shown to facilitate comprehension. They can depict interrelations between ideas and concepts, show spatial relationships in diagrams, and elaborate on how things work using arrows and other symbols. For example, data visualizations help people understand large amounts of quantitative information that would be difficult to manage otherwise.

Graphics Evoke Emotions

It is now well known that emotions are an important component of learning. Evoking emotions helps to maintain attention and makes content more meaningful and memorable. Graphics designed to evoke emotions, such as those that accompany a story or support statistics, are likely to move the learner more than words alone. Graphics bring your learning content to life.

The Graphic Planning Process

You can use the rapid media technique (plan, create, and edit) to develop graphics quickly and affordably, although you will need an additional, equally important, step at the end. This final step involves the placement of your graphics—identifying where to position them in a composition.

The goal of using a plan, create, and edit, place process is to ensure that your graphics are designed with intention rather than randomly or accidentally. Intentional design results in professional-looking materials that are more effective for learning.

Plan at Two Levels

To ensure that graphic design doesn’t become an overwhelming task, start with a planning mindset. Think of graphic design as a problem-solving exercise. What is the problem? At the highest level, you must find a coherent visual treatment for a set of instructional materials. Answering this question will help govern the entire design and development process.

Planning a coherent visual treatment means choosing a color palette, one or two contrasting fonts, and an image style that is consistent throughout your materials. As the treatment evolves, you will find other aspects that you need to plan, such as designing layouts that work for different learning tasks.

Ultimately, when you plan for graphics, you do so at two levels. The highest or global level refers to the big picture perspective. The detailed level involves designing for individual units, such as pages or slides.

The Global Level

The advantage of planning at the highest level is that it creates some uniformity between every page, screen, or slide of your materials. Consistency (without being boring or redundant) makes your work not only professional, but also easier and faster for learners to decode because it looks familiar.

To design your overall visual approach, think through the following questions as they apply to the entire project:

•  What visual approach will align with the audience, content, and overall purpose of the learning event?

•  What visual approach and style will best communicate your message?

•  What visual approach will represent the organization or institution for which you are developing the materials?

•  What visual approach will embody novelty? What approach will surprise and delight the learner?

•  If applicable, what visual approach will improve the user experience?

•  What is my budget for graphics?

•  What is the timeframe in which graphics need to be completed?

The Detailed Level

You will also need to plan which graphics will fulfill individual learning objectives and specific chunks of information. To select or create graphics for individual learning objectives, think through these questions:

•  What type of graphic will best fulfill this learning objective?

•  What graphic will enhance the application of knowledge and skills for this specific chunk of content?

•  What graphic will influence a person to change her attitude?

•  Is the graphic style consistent with the rest of the course?

You Have Many Style Choices

Have you noticed that many instructional materials rely on photographic images for their graphics? Although photographs are not inherently a poor choice, you need not limit yourself to this one style if it doesn’t meet your needs. Part of planning involves finding the style that will be most effective in fulfilling your learning objectives and the message you want to communicate. So be sure to consider the appropriateness and feasibility of a range of graphic styles before deciding on one. If your materials look unique in some way, they are more likely to capture and maintain attention and to be remembered.

You may need to select more than one style. For example, if you need characters to tell a story but you also need to create information graphics, you will most likely want to use two different types of graphics: photographs or illustrations for the story, and diagrams, icons, or graphs for the information graphics. What follows is an explanation of different graphic styles to consider.

Photographs

Photographs are an obvious choice because stock photo agencies and websites offer millions of photographs, both paid and free. It is also fairly easy, with some planning, to shoot your own photographs. Use photographs when you need to show realistic images, if your time and budget are limited, or if you want to stress the credibility of your content. Consider black and white photographs to depict historical times, or for an artistic approach. Photographs can demonstrate actions, show what objects look like, and support the text.

3-D Graphics

Specialists in 3-D graphics create wireframe models on a computer, which then renders each model with a surface texture and lighting. The advantage of 3-D graphics is that they exist as objects that can be rotated and viewed from different angles. You can purchase 3-D graphics online or hire a 3-D artist to create them. They are ideal for showing pristine versions of objects and systems without the extraneous visual information included in photographs.

When your instructional materials require a visual explanation for clarity, consider 3-D graphics to represent technical, scientific, and medical subjects. You can also use 3-D graphics to visualize fantastical environments and characters in stories that motivate learners.

Illustrations

Illustrators either create images using drawing software or draw images by hand and digitize them with a scanner. The range of illustrated graphics is tremendous, from realistic renderings to cartoonish clip art and everything in between. Use illustrations when you are looking for a unique and expressive visual style to convey abstract concepts or humorous situations and characters. Like 3-D graphics, illustrations are also a good choice for depicting objects and scenes that are not visible to the unaided eye, such as comparing planets in the solar system.

Silhouettes

Silhouettes are subtle graphics that simply show the filled-in shape of an object or person without the details. They suggest a concept or topic without distracting the learner with extraneous information. As a graphic style, silhouettes can quickly communicate information.

You can often use silhouettes as an accompaniment to text. For example, in a safety lesson for construction workers, the silhouette of a person wearing protective gear could be placed next to the lesson text.

Icons

Icons are highly distilled graphics. When easily recognizable, icons are perceived and understood rapidly because there is less information to process than in a more detailed graphic. There are many creative ways to use icons, such as to:

•  Represent data in information graphics.

•  Represent categories of content.

•  Guide navigation when placed on buttons.

•  Replace bullet points.

Information Graphics

Information graphics, such as diagrams, graphs, and timelines, condense information and make it more concrete. Use information graphics to explain abstract or complex concepts. Diagrams are useful for representing systems and flow. Graphs are an excellent way to visualize and organize data into a comprehensible format. Timelines depict chronological content, including storytelling.

Well-designed information graphics make content easier to comprehend because the structure and layout of the visual often provides meaning. For example, it is easy to understand a company’s structure by viewing a hierarchical diagram. Representing the steps of a cyclical process in a circular layout adds clarity to the concept.

Match Your Graphic to the Learning Goal

When planning graphics, think in terms of what style or format will match your goal. Then try to remain consistent throughout the materials in terms of the graphic style you choose to fulfill each goal. What follows is a list of common instructional and information goals and a corresponding graphic style (Table 14-1).

Table 14-1. Common Learning Goals and Graphic Styles

Selecting Graphics

Once you have identified your overall graphic approach as well as the individual graphics you need to facilitate learning, you are ready to start selecting your graphics.

You may already be familiar with the many stock photo websites available. Stock photos are professionally shot images that are available for purchase with various licenses. Some sites offer free images, often with the stipulation that you credit the photographer. Other sites require you to pay per image or buy a set number of credits, which you can put toward acquiring images you need. On commercial stock photo sites, you can often find much more than photographs, such as illustrations, icons, silhouettes, information graphics, and other media.

When selecting graphics, seek out images that not only meet the instructional goals, but also are compelling to the learner. Here are a few guidelines:

•  Select graphics that will be meaningful to the audience.

•  Seek graphics that are inclusive and reflect diversity in race, age, ethnicity, disability, and gender.

•  Search for graphics that are a bit unusual, rather than the typical stock photo showing a person smiling at the camera.

•  Look for graphics that will evoke emotions when appropriate.

•  Remember the wide range of graphic styles available.

Editing Graphics

Similar to how you correct and modify the written word, visuals also need adjustments to improve their quality and best meet the instructional goals. Photographs are the most likely—but not the only—type of graphic that will need editing. You will need to use graphic editing software, like Photoshop, GIMP, or a free online tool, to edit your images. PowerPoint is another option. Always save the edited file with a new name so that you have a copy of the original graphic if you need it for future use.

The first step of the editing process is to review the purpose of the graphic. Why did you select it? Then determine whether modifications will help you meet your goals. For example, a photograph may be too dark, or it may include too much information. An icon might need a color change or a background shape so that it stands out.

Some editing techniques that will give your visuals maximum impact are cropping, adjusting brightness and contrast, merging two images to create a new one, and resizing. Let’s look more closely at these four editing tasks.

Cropping

No other editing technique may have a greater effect on a graphic than cropping. Cropping involves cutting away unnecessary visual information from a picture so that it has a greater focus. What remains is the essence of the image.

Stock photographs may be shot from a perspective that is different from your own. A photograph of a factory might show the entire production line, when what you need is a close-up of hands doing work. Or you may have an image of two people consoling someone who is upset when all you need is a close-up of the person in distress. When you trim away the distracting clutter, you create more meaning for the learner.

When cropping, consider the rule of thirds, which is effective for graphics as well as video. By dividing an image into thirds both horizontally and vertically, you can crop it so that the subject is aligned with one of the intersecting lines. This often makes your image more appealing to viewers. See chapter 12 for a more detailed discussion of the rule of thirds.

Adjusting Brightness and Contrast

You may have some images that appear dull and washed out, and you want them to have more punch. During the editing process, you can gently adjust the brightness and contrast to give the image a richer tone. Conversely, some images are too bright, or have too many stark shadows. You can reduce the contrast to even things out.

Suppose you were creating materials for a course on animal care for veterinary technicians. The photographs are critical to the content, but it is difficult to see how the technician is holding the animal in some of the images. By bringing the photos into a graphic editor, you can adjust the contrast so that the technician’s hands can be seen more easily. This type of edit enhances the value of the photos to the learning experience.

Merging Two Images

Another powerful editing technique is to cut out a person or object and place it over a background image. This is one way to place people in new environments without conducting a photo shoot. For example, you can overlay a photo of a doctor onto a background image of a hospital corridor or overlay a photo of a child onto a background image of a playground. Merging two images in this way gives you more options to support the content, particularly when you can’t find or don’t have the budget for the graphics your materials require.

When merging images, a little technical knowledge goes a long way. A basic rule is to save the cut out image as a PNG file so it will maintain its transparent background. This allows the new background graphic to show through. You can also purchase stock photos of people with transparent backgrounds from publishers that specialize in graphics for e-learning.

Resizing and Resolution

The last phase of editing is to resize the graphic and adjust the resolution, as needed. The rule of thumb for resizing a graphic is to make it the size you need rather than accepting it as is. If you only need a small photograph, then reduce the size of the image in a graphic editor. This will reduce the size of the file, which is important if it will be viewed on the web. Smaller file sizes load more quickly, which avoids the frustration that learners experience when they have to wait for large files to display online. Also, avoid trying to enlarge a photo that is too small. This can result in a blurry image.

In addition to sizing, you may want to adjust the resolution of a graphic. Resolution refers to the details of an image expressed in dots per inch (DPI). A higher resolution will show more detail and have more dots per inch. Graphics for the Internet should be a lower resolution than graphics for print. This is because a lower resolution creates a smaller file size that will load quickly when displayed in a web browser or mobile device.

Most stock photo sites will list the DPI of a graphic. Select the DPI that is appropriate for where the image will be displayed. A 72 DPI or slightly higher image is suitable for the web and 300 DPI is suitable for print.

Once you’ve selected your graphics and edited them to suit your quality standards and instructional purpose, you need to figure out where to place them in the learning materials. This next section looks at some of your options.

Placing Graphics

Why should you be concerned about where a graphic is placed in your learning materials? An effective and pleasing arrangement of graphics and text provides certain benefits to your final product. A successful layout will:

•  Provide a professional and polished look.

•  Make it easier to comprehend the information.

•  Indicate what is most important.

•  Facilitate learning.

You can improve the layout of your designs in many ways. Four ways that can have a big impact are creating a balanced layout, using ample white space, establishing a visual hierarchy, and grouping related elements.

Create a Balanced Layout

Two common layout arrangements to consider for your designs are symmetrical and asymmetrical. A symmetrical layout refers to organizing the visual elements so they are centered in such a way that the left side is nearly a mirror image of the right side or the top is nearly a mirror image of the bottom. It does not have to be exact, but is close enough for the symmetry to stand out.

A symmetrical layout emanates balance and harmony because one side is equal in weight to the other. It is a neat and ordered approach to design. This orderliness makes the visual elements easy to perceive and process. A symmetrical design is not difficult to implement when there are just a few visual elements involved. But as the requirements get more complex, it is more difficult to maintain the symmetry. Use a symmetrical layout when you want a more formal and static design, and when you only have to place a few elements (Figure 14-1).

Conversely, an asymmetrical layout has varied elements on either side of the vertical or horizontal axis. This type of design is usually more dynamic than the symmetrical layout because it conveys a sense of disorder or tension. Because of this, viewers often find an asymmetrical layout compelling.

You can find balance in an asymmetrical layout by placing visual elements of equal weight on opposing sides of an axis. For example, you can balance a large image on the left with a large paragraph of text on the right. In this way, you create a sense of dynamic balance within a less stable arrangement. Use an asymmetrical layout if you have many elements to place or if you are looking for a dynamic and energetic design (Figure 14-2).

There are no strict rules for determining which layout to use for learning experience design. Rather, think in terms of aligning your design with the attributes of the audience, the content, and the personality that the organization wants to project.

Use Ample White Space

When looking at a visual, viewers tend to see an image or shape as the foreground and the empty space as the background. It may seem unintuitive to care about the empty space in a layout, yet this region is as important as the filled space. The empty space, referred to as white space in art and design, provides a place for the eyes to rest. It allows a visual to have breathing room. Providing sufficient white space in a layout makes it easier for a learner to visually scan and apprehend the materials without getting overwhelmed. Using ample white space is also a way to point out what is important because an image or text will contrast with the empty space. Note that white space can be any color.

The best way to work with white space is to try to see it as its own form. Examine the shape that the white space creates. Is it aesthetically pleasing? Is there a balance between white space and the visual elements? If you discover that the white space is broken into too many unrelated areas, adjust your layout. Often the solution is to remove elements rather than to add them.

Create a Visual Hierarchy

In addition to providing ample white space, you can facilitate learning by establishing a visual hierarchy. This influences the order in which a person sees and thus interprets the visual elements. It can also intentionally direct the learner’s eyes to what is most important in your materials. A visual hierarchy can improve the efficiency of an instructional experience, helping learners to quickly find what is most relevant. Here are some of the many ways to achieve a hierarchy of emphasis.

Position

Researchers from the fields of user experience, educational psychology, and advertising report that a person’s eyes first land on a page or screen in the upper left. Therefore, position the most important information at the top or left or both.

Size

Make the most important image or text the largest visual element in comparison to the others. You can also deemphasize the less important parts by making them smaller. Use a bit of restraint so that the size differences make sense but are not too extreme, unless done intentionally.

Color

Viewers will notice bright colors before they notice dull colors. Use vivid colors to bring the most important element to the top of the visual hierarchy. Then use calmer colors for the remainder of the design. What can you do if you want emphasis without color, such as when using text? If you want to emphasize a headline or a title that is displayed in black text, make it boldface or select a font with thick, heavy letters.

Visual Cues

You can direct the viewer’s eyes to specific information by adding explicit visual cues:

•  Add an arrow that points directly to the location where you want the viewer’s eyes to land.

•  Use a highlight in a contrasting color or spotlight to emphasize what is most significant.

•  Place a photograph of a person looking directly at the most important information. This will guide the learner’s eyes to the focal point because people are programmed to follow the eyes of another person.

Group to Show Relationships

When people look at a graphic, they tend to see the groups before seeing the individual parts. Also, viewers understand that items that are grouped together are associated with one another. For example, when you see a cluster of overlapping images, you assume they have some type of relationship.

Visual grouping is one of the strongest ways to impart meaning in a design. This principle should influence where you place various elements. If elements are related, place them in close proximity. The learner will process these elements as though they are associated. If elements are not related, place them at a distance from one another.

Summary

With practice, you will become competent in designing graphics. Rather than immediately jumping in to graphic selection, step back and think through your instructional goals. Then follow the plan, create, edit, place process described in this chapter. Designing with intention will result in a quality finished product that ultimately complements and enhances the other elements of your learning materials.

Graphics offer immense potential to transfer knowledge from the learning professional or subject matter expert to the individual learner. If you follow the work flow presented in this chapter, you’ll be on your way to developing high-quality graphics without breaking your budget or wasting precious hours fumbling with complex software.