An Early Christmas Present From TipGuy.

In the spirit of the holiday gift giving season I thought it appropriate to provide you with a free early holiday gift. As I develop e-Learning I tend to amass (is that the right word?) a collection of images, some purchased, but some I created myself in either PowerPoint or PhotoShop. I can't share the purchased one's due to obvious copyright restrictions, however I can share some of my own creations.



Just a sample, there's more on the attachment.



Just click the link below to download a PowerPoint where I have attached several images for your e-Learning usage pleasure. Some are pretty elementary and some more complex, but perhaps you can find something you can use and save yourself a little development time.

DOWNLOAD THE IMAGES POWERPOINT.

In addition to the images, following are some additional resources I sometimes use in my development efforts, so perhaps you might find a use for these too. If you're at all curious about the various tools I use to develop e-Learning you can check out this previous post listing my arsenal of tools.

• Don't have PhotoShop or the know-how to create your own images, check out this Glassy Button Wizard, which makes it a snap to create your own custom glassy buttons.

• Need a Caricature Headshot, check out this interesting little head maker. I don't remember how or when I stumbled across this one, but I've used it a few times when I needed the same character with several different expressions. As an FYI I usually open my final product in PhotoShop and add a little color.

• You might already be aware of ffiles.com as a Flash Resource Site, but it's a great site loaded with a ton of free user-contributed Flash files. I love this site and use it quite frequently to not only snag great Flash menus and such, but also sometimes as a source to get inspiration and ideas. You'll need to have Flash if you plan on editing any of the files.

• If you're not familiar with iStockPhoto, you should be. Not only does it contain a ton of great stock images, but it surprisingly has some pretty cool Flash stuff available too. From a Flash perspective I've primarily used the menus and image gallery stuff. You will need to have Flash if you plan on editing anything. The catch here is that it's not free, you purchase credits and then use these credits to buy stuff. The images and Flash stuff is somewhat fairly priced and if your company will pay for it then I definitely recommend looking into it.

Enjoy the goodies and a very happy holiday season to everybody!

Quite Possibly the Single Most Important Element of Effective E-Learning.

Have you ever browsed to a website and, not knowing exactly why, just thought it was cool? On the opposite end of the spectrum perhaps you've browsed to a site and, for whatever reason, just knew it sort of sucked! It's likely that the developer of the first site took some pride in their craft, and the second developer didn't. It's the little things folks that make all the difference.

It's not hard to find examples of this, check it:  Good Site  -  Bad Site

One of the single most important thing you can do on your way to becoming a ninja elearning developer is to take pride in the product you're producing and not overlook the little things that help the overall appearance of your course.

Yes, the content is important. Yes, interactivity is important, and of course tossing in some story-telling, scenarios and such are also vital, but all that can be void if your course looks crappy. It simply ruins the credibility of your product if it looks cheesy.

It could be appropriate white-space, simple drop shadows or reflections on images, the placement and alignment of your text, or even your font choice. Pay attention to these little things and your half way home to creating kick-butt elearning.

Let's consider product packaging as an example. If you've ever opened any product packaged by apple you'll know what I'm talking about here. It's not an exaggeration that it's an actual pleasure to open an apple product. The innovation alone engineered into the packaging is a marvel, but it's the little things that make the big difference. The clever way the product is placed in the package, the easy to remove seals and fasteners and even the material is nice to feel and smell...yes I said smell. I think apple may scent their packaging because it smells good. I've kept every apple package I've ever purchased, that's how good it is! This is the type of craftsmanship and detail you should work into your elearning courses.

Call me a freak, but I actually like taking someones cheesy looking PowerPoint presentation or attempt at a job aid, and dressing it up and adding my touch to it, and I always get the Ooohs and Awwws when they see what I did with it. It gives me a rush and makes me feel good about what I've accomplished. Let's have a look at an example.

The first image below is the 'Before' version of an elearning page, and although it's just a sample I threw together in about 3 minutes, it's realistic because I've seen a ton just like it in actual courses.

Whats wrong? How about the fact that it looks like it took about 3 minutes to make. Totally unrelated image for the content, my least favorite Times New Roman font with the dreaded indent, The whole thing is off-center, there's too much vacant space at the bottom, and it's all capped off with a misaligned generic looking continue button. This is what you shouldn't do and, although they may not be able to articulate exactly why, will turn your reader off quicker than Kanye can insult Taylor Swift.

I spent about 20 minutes reformatting this page and here is my revised 'After' product.

I changed the image to a more relevant image conveying emotion and threw in a perspective shadow to add depth, put the text into a colored box (spent some time here fiddling with the bevel and shadow until I liked the way the box looked), bulleted and spaced out the font, added some font color variation to emphasize some things, changed the font to a sans-serif font, and capped it all off by creating a cool looking glossy continue button in Photoshop (see my previous post on how to create this glossy effect in Photoshop).

It may take a few extra minutes to do these things but the juice will definitely be worth the squeeze and the end result will be a more professional eye-pleasing product that you can take some pride in. These little things can make the difference between a generic amateurish looking course, and a catchy, professional eye-pleasing masterpiece!

Let's Make Some Glossy Text

I just love me some Glossy Text so I thought I would provide you a tutorial for creating this effect in Photoshop. I sometimes use this effect on my e-Learning title pages and throughout the course as page headers, but this same effect can be used to make your own cool glossy buttons and more. This tutorial uses Photoshop 7 but should translate regardless of your Photoshop version. My PC runs like a slug when I run CS4 so I still use old reliable 7.0. Don't be afraid to experiment and deviate a little to get just the effect you want. Here's our desired result.

Open a new document and slap some text on that bad boy. The thicker the font the better the effect comes out.

Put a light gray 'Stroke' on it (About 2 pixels) and also put a dark 'Inner Glow' until it looks something like this.

Now you need to add an additional layer above your text layer.

Now hold down the 'Ctrl' key on your keyboard and click the original text layer so your text looks like this.

Now we want to bring that selection in a little so click 'Select' from the top menu, choose 'Modify', then 'Contract' and contract the selection by 1 or 2 pixels (depending on the original size of your font). I contracted by 2 pixels here. Your image should now look like this.

Now choose the Elliptical Marquee Tool.

Now hold down 'Shift+Alt' and select only the top part of your selection. You're image should now look like this.

Now select your gradient tool and set it up as 'Foreground to Transparent', with the Foreground being white.

Start at the very top of your selection and drag down to the bottom of your selection like so.

Now deselect your image and you should have something similar to this.

This is pretty good as it is but I like to access the Blending Options for the top layer and lighten it every so slightly, then I go play with the previous 'Inner Bevel' setting I did earlier until I get it just like I want it. Here is my final product.

Now go make some cool glossy text and buttons. Have fun!

My Arsenal of e-Learning Tools.

I'm always curious what other developers have in their 'tools' portfolio so in the spirit of not being selfish, here is my e-Learning arsenal of tools.

Lectora - Up until recently this was my primary development tool. A simple-as-pie WYSIWYG editor that makes it a snap to do the basics (Mouse-over, show & hides, etc.). It has a built-in assessment/quiz tool but with the exception of the Multiple Choice and True/False it sorta bites. Image import is as easy and drag-and-drop and you can import flash files, videos, etc. The biggest compliment to Lectora is it's ease of use. I like it as the primary tool that I embed content into. Also a nice tool for building websites.

Articulate - I have most of the suite of Articulate products (Presenter, Engage, QuizMaker) and after some trepidation at first, I have really warmed up to this PowerPoint to e-Learning tool. If anything it has forced me to improve my PowerPoint skills three-fold. Although it lacks some of the most basic of e-Learning functionality like having a button change color on mouse-over, or easily doing show & hides on one page, it makes up for it's deficiencies in other avenues. Unleash the beast, learn PowerPoint and make some cool stuff with this bad-boy. Two words; Animations and Annotations!

Adobe Captivate - My tool of choice for system simulations. Open an application, click record and your output is a very cool simulation. Think of it as a screen recording tool on steroids. You can even create stand-alone courses in Captivate, although I've never done this because I'm not comfortable with the SCORM output or incorporation into my LMS. I usually take my Captivate output and embed it into Lectora or Articulate. Both Lectora and Artciulate make SCORM/LMS publishing very easy.

Adobe Flash - Although I have used this tool less when the newer version forced you to learn Actionscript, I still like it to create simple text and image animations, plus I like to snag free flash animations (there's a ton of them out there) and then manipulate them to my liking.

Adobe Photoshop - The industry standard for image creation and manipulation. I use it to create buttons, text, and edit images I might purchase from a service like iStock Photo. Although I have recently been able to create some very cool things in PowerPoint using Clipart, I still rely on Photoshop for the heavy lifting.

Audacity - This is a free audio editing software and I just love it for recording and editing audio. A must have for your portfolio, especially considering it's free.