Designing Instructional Media

When designing for instructional media you want to keep it simple, clean, and concise. The acronym C.R.A.P., lays out the four key guidelines for instructional media and those are contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity. Points should be clear to the reader, bold in size, and visually appealing! There is no need to overcrowd the slides with too much information and/or graphics or to use obnoxious slide backgrounds and fancy transitions. It is okay to use transitions and graphics in moderation but too much of any of these things can be distracting from the points you are trying to convey in your presentation.  The focus in any layout design should be the material and making sure it is organized in an effective way rather than the features that will appear on it or the background of the power point.

            I’m only a second year telecom major and therefore am not completely invested into all the aspects of my field yet, so it’s a little tricky for me to relate this subject to my studies. However, telecommunications is all about communicating in a clear and effective way and there are also different tiers to my major; it’s not just in front of the camera. The web designing guidelines would really be useful to help make sure a news website is easy to follow and not crammed with too much information as to distract the readers. It’s never good to use too many graphics but putting a picture alongside a news story, in some cases, may be very helpful to help make sure the viewers are really making sense of the event they are reading about. Properly designing for the web is very important in order to communicate effectively with the public and keep them coming back to your site for more news updates.

            The key feature of modern web design is simplicity. It can’t be stated any simpler than that and this article continues to emphasize the importance of that for the current style in graphic design for the web. I thought this was a useful outside resource because it shows examples of some excellent graphic design technique, allowing you to really understand how a clear and easy to follow web page should look. This article explains that you should design the content, not the page. Graphics should be used sparingly, alignment should be centered, text should be nice and large for your audience and there should be plenty of white space. Seems like we already know these facts but they truly are the main guidelines to follow for excellent web design. This site just lays it out in a different way and helps you make a design from scratch.