Adobe Captivate: Simple, Clean eLearning Design

As of late, I have been feeling a “need” to be creative and unleash some of my artistic skills. As such, I’ve been on a roll and producing tons of graphic designs for my blog over the last few days. It’s great to have this blog as an outlet for my energy and to share my artwork. I really appreciate the support everyone’s been showing. So, I just created a few random eLearning slides in Adobe Captivate just for fun! I also use these designs in my portfolio, and might use them as templates in future projects if the opportunity arises. Mostly, just for fun though!  Just a few random comments about what went into the design:

• I really like using rectangles with rounded corners. I feel like it really “softens” the design, as opposed to really sharp and angular rectangle edges. I’ve noticed I use them a lot!
• I started out with the photo of the business woman with the headset, and then picked up the light blue background colour from her shirt using the “Eyedropper” tool in the Captivate colour pane. So that’s how I picked my colour scheme. I decided to just go 2 colours, light blue and white.
• I love using photos with white backgrounds, or cutting out the background altogether (as I did with the headset woman). I find it looks clean and less cluttery that having photos with busy backgrounds.
• In a regular project, I would remove the duration/minutes showing at the bottom of the Table of Contents using a widget I found online. Very handy if you don’t want users to see the duration.
• The “decorative” font is called Dear Joe and the body text font is Calibri. 
• For the “Incorrect/Correct” slides, I did a copy/paste of the question slide, and then put a gray rectangle with medium transperancy over top. Then I added the “Correct” and “Incorrect” bubbles over top. I like the faded out background effect, although I think I should have made the transperancy level a bit darker. The woman shows through too much.
• I don’t really like how the Captivate TOC says “Slide Title”. I have looked into ways to remove it but have not been succesful as of yet. If anyone knows how, let me know!
• Now that it’s done and I look at the screenshots, I think I would go back and make the Playbar at the bottom an “overlay”. As such, I would have to edit the slides and move everything upwards, so the playbar doesn’t cover anything. But I think it would look better, and would look more balance, as opposed to the playbar hanging off the bottom right now on its own. Not a big deal though.

Feel free to leave feedback and comments.

 

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