Creating your Visual Design Solution

Visual Communication in Learning Design Visual Communication in Learning Design Creating your Visual Design Solution

Sketching Your Ideas

Before we jump into doing the final design in Canva, let’s grab a pencil and paper and sketch our rough ideas first. Here are some few things why sketching is vital to our design process:

It’s easy to get so enamored by our first idea that we often forget there might be better ways of expressing or conveying the message or solution of our design. Practice churning out all the rough ideas in your head, both good and bad. From there, you can choose which ones you’d like to develop more and finalize with the team. In the example above, we’ve created 6 sketch ideas or “studies” to compare each of them and see what design best fits the challenge. You may let your team vote on which ideas are good but ultimately, you as a visual designer have that creative judgment to finalize what is the best visual design solution.

Watch out for spending too much time on one aspect of your design rather than looking at it first as a whole. In the initial stages of designing, it’s better to lay out the foundations, such as creating the framework or backbone where the elements are placed and held together. This is essential to see the overall flow and experience of a design. Once you’ve established that, you may chip through the details in each part enhancing and giving more context to the design.

Sketching ideas also helps us communicate our thought process in designing when our team gives us feedback. It brings them to your work and they can give different perspectives you may filter and use to improve your design. Sharing the rough sketches brings out the rawness to the design and helps make pivots early on when needed instead of cramming the major revisions when the design is already intended to be final.

Tips in sketching:

It’s okay to use stick figures! It’s better to start with the basic shapes and lines because those are the simplest forms to present our ideas clearly. What’s important is that we get the message across. Worry about the details later!
Timebox yourself. Allot 15-20 mins of sketching at least 3 ideas to your design challenge. If you can think of more, that’s great! Create that sense of “rush” when you sketch so you have that energy of pouring all of your ideas.
Practice and have fun! Mastering any kind of skill does require a lot of practice but don’t forget to enjoy the process along the way. It makes the journey much lighter and more delightful.

So, are you ready with your chosen sketch idea? Let’s start designing!

Building Your Design in Canva

Here we are! We’re ready to dive in once again and create our visual design solution for our chosen Design Challenge! If you need to remember things from our previous modules, you can always go back to them through our menu panel on the left side of your screen to navigate around our course. Don’t worry, this won’t be graded! But we’ll have our usual peer feedback in the next segment to see how else we can improve our design.

Design in Canva

Checkpoints: Guide questions to self-assess your design.

Does the design convey a clear single-minded message?
Do the layout and composition lead the audience’s eyes from one important info to the other?
Does the design spark interest through contrast or harmony?

When you’re done, Save and Download your design and proceed to the next activity. :)

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Creating your Visual Design Solution – Habi Plus