5 Adobe Illustrator Tips to Create Beautiful Learning Experiences in Storyline

Introduction

When looking for e-learning development and instructional design related opportunities we often find there is a need for some knowledge of the Adobe Creative Suite which includes Illustrator and Photoshop among many other useful creative cloud apps.

With this blog post, I would like to give you a few ideas about how to use Adobe Illustrator, the industry standard tool to help you create more appealing e-learning courses. While people come from all sorts of different backgrounds when they enter the field of instructional design, it's not too usual that they are proficient users of the various graphic design software.

If you would like to chat about it or interested in a more detailed explanation of how the samples below were created, feel free to leave a comment or get in touch!

#1 Taking vector images into pieces

This is probably the most often used function of Illustrator for e-learning purposes. Working with vector images can give you unlimited options to customise, animate and take graphics into pieces. Let’s look at an example in action.

Click to see a short video about Frankfurt, Germany.

Many things are simultaneously happening on-screen, but the editing itself only requires taking the graphic into pieces and putting them into Storyline. There, using the timeline and built-in animations, you can easily create a nice-looking mini story to enhance the visual aspect of your course or point out specific parts of an image.

Vector graphics editing can come very handy when you create custom learning experiences or if you would like to set the scene for a course with a specific situation. You can search in the creative cloud libraries for a set of other tools and even stock images and more recently, AI-generated images to enhance your design.

#2 Changing colours – branding

This is also an often-needed feature as creating e-learning courses almost always means following specific branding requirements too. This can mean the logo of the company, the general look and feel and the colours to use too.

Staying with the previous Frankfurt example, let’s see how using colours could create a nice mini activity:

Here, we need to use the select tool to choose the buildings we want to work with, then use the colour picker to select the colour we received within the branding guidelines.

The rest is a little bit of positioning, timing and animation in Storyline.

#3 Creating graphs

Another use of taking graphics into pieces is creating graphs of different sorts. This will not only make the statistics more presentable but will also allow you to present data with more control (such as timing, phasing and variety).

Here, I used Freepik.com to find a collection of graphs and from there it was fairly easy to take them apart and after inserting them to Storyline set the timeline and the animation.

#4 Creating images from scratch

This can be helpful when you want to customise the look and feel of the image that you work with without compromising on the quality.

I created the image of this invoice for one of my portfolio projects. The plan was to have an invoice that remains clear even after zooming in (video) and offers a lot of editing options for developing tasks later in the course.

Here is the original invoice:

And here is the same invoice edited for a drag and drop activity. After creating the image, it was quite easy to delete a few elements (ie. the bank account or VAT number) which then can lead to an activity for the learners to review the different parts of an invoice.

If you would like to see the course in action, here is the portfolio entry in question:

https://www.skilluminair.com/apinvoice

#5 Custom buttons

Last but not least, something that is probably less often used but still could be fun in terms of customising learning experiences. Using vector images, we can easily create a nicely designed button like the one below.

The important thing to remember is that in Storyline we will need to handle them one by one if we want to use different animation or timing for them.

Conclusion

This blog post was just a short introduction to the unlimited possibilities in the use of Adobe Illustrator for e-learning development work. The beauty of using the software is the wide range of tools available and the opportunities for customising your content it offers.

It takes a bit of time to get there, but all the tips above require learning how a couple of tools and functions work, so it shouldn’t be a big problem.

Do you have any examples of using the software in your projects?

Let me know in the comments below!