Transitions

"Transitions" was a passion project of mine where I wanted to improve in the aesthetic aspect of instructional design. In particular, I played around with ways of making transitions between slides smooth, attractive, and a little more creative. In order to achieve what I wanted to, I had to make heavy use of layers, variables and triggers, and it took a bit of trial-and-error to get some of these effects working. The end result is a product that, while maybe not the most functional for standard eLearning, certainly taught me a lot about how to make things visually appealing. While "Transitions" certainly isn't perfect even in that department, it was never meant to be – it was simply an incredibly valuable learning experience.

You can explore the work that I've done yourself by loading up the module below!

The Who: For my own learning and development

The What: A module to improve my own visual design and software skills

The How: Articulate Storyline 360, GIMP, Camtasia

The Problem

As this project was entirely a learning experience for me that I undertook in my free time, the problem wasn't anything a client needed solving or that I wanted to use for my own needs; it was a problem with my own skills.

I felt like my visual design skills were simply not up to par. I would see this incredibly beautiful projects designed by people with years of experience in the industry, and wondered how they did some of those amazing things. Truth be told, I felt a little jealous, though I had been using Storyline for less than a month at this point. I decided I needed to do something about my lacking skills.

The Process

There was no storyboarding, no prototyping, no preliminary writing that was done here. Because I wasn't worried so much about the functionality of this project and I was doing this for my own skills, none of that was necessary. Instead, I took inspiration from some of the features in modules I had seen from other designers, and created versions of my own. I tried not to use YouTube tutorials or Google to solve my problems; if this was going to be a learning experience, then I wanted to learn to do these things on my own as much as possible.

To create the different effects and transitions I used, I had to become very familiar with layers and some complicated variable and trigger relationships. I played around a lot with the timeline to have objects enter, exit and appear exactly when I wanted to. The end result is a project that, while maybe not the most functional for typical e-Learning purposes and not even particularly fancy in terms of its looks and functions, was nevertheless a huge learning experience for me.