Don't forget visual hierarchy

- [Instructor] When designing e-learning here in Storyline 2, there are bad habits that people often fall into. We're going to address them in this chapter. We're going to start with visual hierarchy and we'll be working with this file throughout the chapter. It's called BadHabits. You'll find it in the Chapter 6 folder of your exercise files. We're starting here on slide 1, where we see the logo, a title, and some visual notes, the visual notes we started in the previous movie. As you can see, there's a combination of text and graphics, and they're kind of scattered around the slide with no particular order, and that causes confusion.

We want to remember visual hierarchy, because the eye naturally wants to go from left to right, at least in western civilizations. We want to keep that in mind, create a focal point, so we're directing the learner's attention to the areas on this slide where we want them to go, in order. So let's start with what we see in the top left corner. We see the logo. That's fine, and maybe that's where people should start. This is a London hotel slide. Over here on the right is the title, and it kind of gets lost in the mess of all these visual notes.

So, to make it stand out, we can change its size. So click on the border, so it's selected, and let's go up here to the Font group on the ribbon. All we're going to do is bump this up to 20, maybe a little bigger, 24. Looks good. Click in the background, all of a sudden, it stands out. Your eye is naturally going to go from the logo to the title. That's a good order. Now down below we see these objects that are scattered around. I'm thinking maybe the Eiffel Tower in the middle should be the focal point.

So we can select it, and maybe make it a little bit larger, and leave it right in the center. That's okay. Naturally, we should be going down to the left to the right, but we can create a focal point by making this a little bit bigger than the rest. So that means going to the other items like San Francisco, and sizing it down, maybe moving it up here a little bit. New York, you can see, it's kind of big and it's close to the edges. Remember white space is going to help as well, so we can size it down, kind of move it around as well.

Maybe in a little bit. Just takes a little experimentation. Hong Kong is kind of big over here, and not as important as other items, so we can size that down. You've got to be careful sometimes when combining text that you've added. You can see what's happening there. It's growing, and the font is not. So, in this case, we might want to go inside and size down the fonts. Just keep that in mind. Even if it's grouped, if it was created separately. Some of these were not. We may have to address them separately.

So I'm going to bump it down to 18. There we go. Now I can go to the item itself, the grouped item, and size it down, and move it a little bit. So we have some white space, and space between our focal point, which is the Eiffel Tower in Paris. London needs to be sized down as well. So we have better order. We have a focal point, and we have visual hierarchy. Something that many people forget when designing their e-learning projects here in Storyline 2.