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Stop paying for visually engaging educational resources and start making your own!

As teachers, we are constantly developing activities for our students, yet the skill of graphic
design that is essential to engaging today’s digital learners is not part of any teacher prep program.
Learn the tricks that make up the magic sauce for designing graphics and documents.

Visit my poster session at VSTE 2022 on Monday, December 5th!

Explore, Enhance, Engage: How Design Tools Can Change Your Classroom

Explore, Enhance, Engage:

How Design Tools Can Change Your Classroom

"Great teachers are learning designers," Andrew Miller

Layout

How you arrange objects, text, shapes, images, and icons on a page is the foundation for a good design, but you also need to pay attention to spacing and the distance between objects.

Pica

Picas are used to represent horizontal measurements, like column width. One pica equals 12 points, with 6 picas to an inch. picas help

with the spacing of objects and is used when designing newspapers, magazines, and ads.

White Space

Also known as negative space or blank space, this is the area or spacing between objects in a layout. It can be used to separate sections, define areas, show importance, or allow the design to “breathe”.

Top Reasons to Love White Space: Less clutter, boots readability, makes layout easier to flow, draws attention and invites people in, increases comprehension, makes a good first impression, keeps learners engaged, and makes layouts balanced and harmonious.

Hierarchy

Making things different sizes to add variety and clarify what's important.

The hierarchy shows the importance of the different objects within a layout. This can be emphasized through the use of font size, color, contrast, alignment, repetition, and white space. For example, titles and headlines will be larger than the body text or the title may have a bright color.

Font

A particular size, weight, and style of a typeface that can create mood and atmosphere.

Font and Typeface often get confused: The typeface is the design and the variations under it are fonts.

For example, Arial is a typeface; 16pt Arial Bold is a font.

There are 5 types of typefaces:

Serif
Sans Serif
Script
Monospaced
Display

Serif and Sans Serif are good for the body of the text or headlines, while Script and Display are only for headlines. Monospaced is usually used for coding, but can also be used for the body or headlines.

Serif fonts have a small decorative tail, while Sans Serif does not. Use a maximum of two fonts. Use Serif fonts for headings and use Sans Serif fonts for body text.

Typography and font can also include the arranging of type to make it readable, legible, attractive, and engaging in print or digital designs.

Color

How different colors relate to each other and how they look when they are combined.

Find well-balanced color schemes that help attract attention.

60-30-10 Rule

60% should be dedicated to one color, usually, a neutral color

30% to a complementary color

10% to an accent color

Use Variations

If you want other colors, try using darker and lighter variations of already selected colors, also known as tints and shades.

Use Color Generators

Simplify the task of finding well-balanced color schemes. Use built-in generators in Canva or Adobe Express or use one of these: bit.ly/color_generators