Having good design skills is essential for becoming a good course creator. Every platform that you use to promote your course (Facebook, Udemy, your website and so on) must have high quality images.
Hone Up Your Design Skills
Being an online instructor isn’t about creating a PowerPoint with a bunch of words on it and calling that a course. It requires you to pay keen attention to detail. Students will choose courses that look better.
The only instance in which design doesn’t really matter is if your students are already aware of your reputation and are joining your class on that basis. There are some instructors out there like that who already have large audiences. So in their case, it is their personality that sells the course.
However, a new student coming to your course, your course has to look like a high quality course in order to keep them. This takes good design. The key elements to focus on when designing your course are: font styles, colour schemes, line spacing, and the quality of the images you’re going to use.
Your Tips For Design
The tips that I’m going to share with you are things I’ve learnt by observing other people’s websites and blogs. Some of my design experience also comes from my website development work. The first site that I want to direct you to is Ben Fhala’s Udemy page.
When you look at all of his courses you will notice that the designs are similar. Consistency is key in design. Although my page is slightly different, I still try to maintain a level of consistency. Ben’s design is not only consistent, it’s also professional. On his Facebook page he also uses the same consistent theme.
Another site that I want you to look at is design-seeds.com. I use this website often because it has some great colour schemes. It is a great site to use as a novice to help you choose the right colour scheme for your website.
The creator of this blog takes photographs and uses colours from the photographs to create colour schemes. Having consistent colours that go together can truly transform your courses and branding into something memorable.
Inspiration For Design Skills
Dribbble.com
is an inspirational site for graphic designers that can also give you some inspiration. Graphic designers post their images and designs here. So, there is a plethora of ideas to choose from. I fervently believe that gaining inspiration from this and the other sites I’ve mentioned will be a great way for you to improve your course and attract more students.
You can also get inspiration from the most unlikely of places. The menu at your favourite restaurant, your church’s weekly program, movie posters, and the fliers that people hand to you on the streets can all be great sources of inspiration, even if they are terribly designed.
At least you’ll know what not to do. Look carefully at the fonts and colours chosen. Do they blend well together? Do they stand out in the right ways? My suggestion for the most professional font is something that falls in the Sans Serif family. Sans Serif fonts include Helvetica, Arial, and Calibri. They aren’t fancy. However, they work for me and make my course material look good.
Photoshop will need to become your new best friend. So spend some time learning it. It can seem very intimidating to use initially, but after you play around with it for a while you’ll realize how quickly you become a pro. You can try it for free for 30 days or purchase the cheaper version called Photoshop Elements.
