Mastering Visual Design for Learning with Connie Malamed

In this episode of The L&D Explorers Podcast, we sat down with Connie Malamed, founder of The eLearning Coach and visual design expert.

Connie explores the importance of mastering visual design for learning, sharing insights on choosing effective visuals, overcoming design challenges, and practical ways to enhance your skills. From sketching ideas to gathering learner feedback, Connie offers actionable advice to help instructional designers create visually engaging and impactful learning experiences.

Key takeaways

1. Choosing the right visuals for eLearning

If we use visuals...learners have two ways to get the information instead of just one way (like all text.) 

2. Overcoming challenges in visual design

People need to build a business case and explain to marketing or leadership that learning design requires its own style guides.

Instructional designers should work to create learner-friendly style guides. Use white space to make content easier to read and apply visual hierarchy, like size and positioning, to highlight key information and guide attention. It is important to focus on readability, legibility, and overall learner engagement.

3. Gather feedback on visual design

It doesn't really matter what I think—go talk to the learners. Show it to them.

Show your prototypes to a small sample of learners (5–7 people) to gather honest feedback and listen to their reactions. If learners don’t like it or don’t understand it, it won’t work. 

3 Ways to improve visual design skills

1. Learn the principles – Master the basics: contrast, unity, visual hierarchy, and colors
2. Practice like crazy – Focus on applying what you’ve learned and measure progress by comparing new work to past work.
3. Raise your awareness of design – Analyze visual design everywhere you go: ads, websites, magazines, and signage. Note what works and what doesn’t.

Actionable insights

Choose images that clearly support your message and help learners understand. Start by sketching your ideas. Then, use basic design tricks like contrast and balance to highlight important details. Don’t forget to share your designs with learners and get their feedback—it’s the best way to improve and make sure your visuals really connect.

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Mentioned in episode

• Mastering Instructional Design
• Breaking into Instructional Design
• Connie Malamed's LinkedIn
• Connie Malamed's X

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We hope you enjoyed this episode of our L&D Explorers Podcast! Subscribe to our YouTube, Podbean, or Spotify so you don’t miss the next episode. 

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Transcript: 

Dan:
Hey everyone, welcome back! This is the L&D Explorers Podcast, and my name is Dan Gorgone. I'm the course producer at GoSkills, and we're very happy to be joined by Connie Malamed, who is the founder and chief mentor at Mastering Instructional Design.

She’s an international keynote speaker and author. So, Connie, thank you so much for joining us today.

Connie:
Well, thanks for having me, Dan! Glad to be here.

Dan:
Yeah, our topic today is Mastering Visual Design for Learning, and I know that there are a lot of L&D professionals out there who hear this—hear “visual design”—and maybe their brains start to melt.

Because I know it’s very, very easy for us—and I include myself in this—to think: “If we just have a mountain of text or knowledge that we can share with our learners, and they can just absorb that and access it whenever needed, then that would be wonderful.”

But as a lot of us in the field know, being able to offer a variety when it comes to the knowledge and the information we share—text and visuals—is a much better way for people to absorb and understand it.

So, seeing as you're our expert here, could you start our discussion by kind of explaining the importance of visual design when it comes to today's digital learning environments?

Connie:
Sure. Well, first of all, so many of our products are visual. E-learning is very visual.

Manuals, participation manuals, and job aids are often visual—along with text. Then we’ve got video, right? So for people who are sighted, visuals are our strongest sense.

There are more brain resources devoted to visuals than to any other sense for sighted individuals.

The other thing is that visuals are motivating. They give people aesthetic pleasure. If they're well done, they also improve a company’s or an organization’s credibility.

From a learning perspective, there’s the theory of dual coding, which is fairly well accepted. I mean, there’s debate about every theory, but this one is pretty solid.

Dual coding suggests that humans have two tracks—at least—for perceiving and processing information.

One is the visual track, and the other is the verbal track, which includes text and/or audio.

So, if we use visuals—relevant visuals that enhance understanding and meaning—learners have two ways to get the information instead of just one way (like all text).

Dan:

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Connie:
One other interesting thing is when we look at a graphic, we perceive it in parallel—in other words, we see the whole thing at once.

But when we read text, we process it serially—word after word, line after line—that’s just how you read.

The gestalt of seeing an entire visual has a different impact on us. We get the big picture—if it’s well done—right away, before we even dive into the details.

So those are some of the advantages of using visuals for learning.

Got it! Here’s the next section:

Connie:
One other interesting thing is when we look at a graphic, we perceive it in parallel—in other words, we see the whole thing at once.

But when we read text, we process it serially—word after word, line after line—that’s just how you read.

The gestalt of seeing an entire visual has a different impact on us. We get the big picture—if it’s well done—right away, before we even dive into the details.

So those are some of the advantages of using visuals for learning.

Dan:
So when we talk about using visuals for learning, we could talk about video, and video comes in so many different formats.

You’ve got your talking head videos—like what we’re doing right now—where maybe there’s a lecturer delivering information. There could be screenshots, screen shares, or screen recordings.

You also have animations and all kinds of other visuals—pictures, graphics, and so on.

The variety of visuals we can use feels never-ending, but it can also be challenging for instructional designers. Sometimes, it feels like we have too many options to choose from.

That’s why I said earlier—sometimes your brain melts—because you’re trying to think: “If I want to create a visual that goes with this part of the course, what should I do?”

But then there’s another part of the course, and then another part—it just feels overwhelming.

So, is there a way instructional designers can simplify the process of taking the knowledge and information they need to share and figuring out the best visual approach? Even if it’s just the first step to identify which visuals will be the most effective for a piece of learning?

Got it! Here’s the next section:

Connie:
One other interesting thing is when we look at a graphic, we perceive it in parallel—in other words, we see the whole thing at once.

But when we read text, we process it serially—word after word, line after line—that’s just how you read.

The gestalt of seeing an entire visual has a different impact on us. We get the big picture—if it’s well done—right away, before we even dive into the details.

So those are some of the advantages of using visuals for learning.

Dan:
So when we talk about using visuals for learning, we could talk about video, and video comes in so many different formats.

You’ve got your talking head videos—like what we’re doing right now—where maybe there’s a lecturer delivering information. There could be screenshots, screen shares, or screen recordings.

You also have animations and all kinds of other visuals—pictures, graphics, and so on.

The variety of visuals we can use feels never-ending, but it can also be challenging for instructional designers. Sometimes, it feels like we have too many options to choose from.

That’s why I said earlier—sometimes your brain melts—because you’re trying to think: “If I want to create a visual that goes with this part of the course, what should I do?”

But then there’s another part of the course, and then another part—it just feels overwhelming.

So, is there a way instructional designers can simplify the process of taking the knowledge and information they need to share and figuring out the best visual approach? Even if it’s just the first step to identify which visuals will be the most effective for a piece of learning?

Connie:
That’s a great question! I do want to point people to an article I wrote about this on The eLearning Coach. It’s called something like, “Which Graphic Should I Choose?”

There are some common-sense rules. For example:

• If you’re describing a system, you probably want to show the components of the system visually. That would be a diagram.
• If you’re telling a story, then you want to show the characters and their environment.

So there is a way to make a kind of one-to-one correspondence between what your goal is in that moment—not the goal for the whole course, but the goal for that explanation—and the type of visual you choose.

Sometimes, though, there’s really not much to show visually. But you might still want something there for aesthetic purposes.

That’s what some people call—perhaps a bit derogatorily—“eye candy.”

When I want to make something visually appealing but don’t want to distract from the real message, I might use a silhouette.

For example, let’s say I’m talking about taking care of children. I might use a silhouette of a parent holding a child. You can’t really tell who it is or what they look like, but the action is clear.

The silhouette adds a little aesthetic appeal and motivation without taking away from the message.

Dan:

That’s a great example.

Connie:
You can have some screens with plain text, but you can’t have too many of them. Another thing you can do is take your bullet points and put them in a shape or use a little representative icon for each bullet point. That makes it a little bit more interesting. I actually have another article on The eLearning Coach called “Alternatives to Bullet Points,” where I go into more detail.

In general, I think if you stop and think, “What is the goal right here? What message do I want to deliver?” you can probably come up with a decent visual to go along with it that will add meaning. And the visual has to be relevant—rule number one is that visuals must be relevant to the content.

Dan:
Well, in that answer, you mentioned your blog a couple of times, and I know it sounds like you’re plugging it and just want people to go there, but you’re actually doing my job for me. I really wanted to direct people to the eLearningCoach.com.

Before I started talking to you, I was going through it, and I have to say, every post, every article on there looks so interesting and relevant to learning and development professionals. So I’ll plug it as well—eLearningCoach.com—and invite people to check it out.

Connie:

Thank you. There’s a menu on the site called Multimedia, and under that are many articles specifically about graphics and visuals. There are a lot of good books and websites out there too. I just happen to know what I’ve written about, so it’s easy to refer to it.

Dan:

I wanted to ask you about some of the common challenges instructional designers face when they’re trying to improve their visual design skills. What are some of those challenges, and how can they overcome them?

Connie:
There are kind of two levels of challenges. One is individual skills, and the other is more about the organization they work in.

For example, a marketing team might give the learning design team the colors and fonts they have to use for branding. But the marketing team doesn’t necessarily understand the process of learning.

Our brains aren’t recorders. One learning event is almost never enough. People need reinforcement, they need to revisit the content, discuss it, look at it from different angles, practice it, and get support from supervisors.

One big problem I often hear when I teach visual design is, “My marketing department gives me horrible colors and unreadable fonts.” That’s a real issue. People need to build a business case and explain to marketing or leadership that learning design requires its own style guides. These guides ensure readability, legibility, and overall learner engagement.

Sometimes, if the colors are too intense, I’ll slightly stray from the brand colors—just a little bit—so the learners’ eyes don’t get fatigued. For example, I might use a lighter or medium version of the colors. It’s subtle, but it makes a difference.

Dan:

That’s a clever workaround.

Connie:
It’s all about finding balance so that the visuals look good together and support learning, rather than working against it.

Now, on an individual level, people often make things too cluttered. They don’t realize how much breathing space—also called white space—elements need.

White space means having space around the text, enough line spacing between sentences, and space around graphics. It gives the visuals room to breathe and helps learners focus.

Another common issue is not understanding visual hierarchy. That’s a more advanced graphic design concept, but it’s essential. Most instructional designers haven’t been through a university course on this topic, so they just don’t know about it.

Visual hierarchy is about deciding what’s most important on a slide or screen and then emphasizing it. You might make it larger, position it at the top, or put it in the upper left corner.

The goal is to guide learners’ eyes to the most important information first, whether it’s a graphic, headline, or piece of text. You can do that through size, brightness, and positioning—those are three common techniques for creating visual hierarchy.

Dan:

That makes so much sense.

Got it! Here’s the continuation without any bolding except for names:

Connie:
You can have some screens with plain text, but you can’t have too many of them. Another thing you can do is take your bullet points and put them in a shape or use a little representative icon for each bullet point. That makes it a little bit more interesting. I actually have another article on The eLearning Coach called “Alternatives to Bullet Points,” where I go into more detail.

In general, I think if you stop and think, “What is the goal right here? What message do I want to deliver?” you can probably come up with a decent visual to go along with it that will add meaning. And the visual has to be relevant—rule number one is that visuals must be relevant to the content.

Dan:
Well, in that answer, you mentioned your blog a couple of times, and I know it sounds like you’re plugging it and just want people to go there, but you’re actually doing my job for me. I really wanted to direct people to the eLearningCoach.com.

Before I started talking to you, I was going through it, and I have to say, every post, every article on there looks so interesting and relevant to learning and development professionals. So I’ll plug it as well—eLearningCoach.com—and invite people to check it out.

Connie:
Thank you. There’s a menu on the site called Multimedia, and under that are many articles specifically about graphics and visuals. There are a lot of good books and websites out there too. I just happen to know what I’ve written about, so it’s easy to refer to it.

Dan:
I wanted to ask you about some of the common challenges instructional designers face when they’re trying to improve their visual design skills. What are some of those challenges, and how can they overcome them?

Connie:
There are kind of two levels of challenges. One is individual skills, and the other is more about the organization they work in.

For example, a marketing team might give the learning design team the colors and fonts they have to use for branding. But the marketing team doesn’t necessarily understand the process of learning.

Our brains aren’t recorders. One learning event is almost never enough. People need reinforcement, they need to revisit the content, discuss it, look at it from different angles, practice it, and get support from supervisors.

One big problem I often hear when I teach visual design is, “My marketing department gives me horrible colors and unreadable fonts.” That’s a real issue. People need to build a business case and explain to marketing or leadership that learning design requires its own style guides. These guides ensure readability, legibility, and overall learner engagement.

Sometimes, if the colors are too intense, I’ll slightly stray from the brand colors—just a little bit—so the learners’ eyes don’t get fatigued. For example, I might use a lighter or medium version of the colors. It’s subtle, but it makes a difference.

Dan:
That’s a clever workaround.

Connie:
It’s all about finding balance so that the visuals look good together and support learning, rather than working against it.

 

Now, on an individual level, people often make things too cluttered. They don’t realize how much breathing space—also called white space—elements need.

White space means having space around the text, enough line spacing between sentences, and space around graphics. It gives the visuals room to breathe and helps learners focus.

Another common issue is not understanding visual hierarchy. That’s a more advanced graphic design concept, but it’s essential. Most instructional designers haven’t been through a university course on this topic, so they just don’t know about it.

Visual hierarchy is about deciding what’s most important on a slide or screen and then emphasizing it. You might make it larger, position it at the top, or put it in the upper left corner.

The goal is to guide learners’ eyes to the most important information first, whether it’s a graphic, headline, or piece of text. You can do that through size, brightness, and positioning—those are three common techniques for creating visual hierarchy.

Dan:
That makes so much sense.

Connie:
Finally, another challenge is not knowing where to start. You’re just staring at a blank screen and have no idea what to do.

Remember, designers sketch. Instructional designers and learning designers should think like designers and sketch out their ideas first.

You don’t need to show your sketches to anyone. Just take a piece of paper, draw six to nine rectangles in the same shape or orientation as the screen you’re working with, and start sketching out different ideas.

You’ll be amazed at how many creative layouts you can come up with. Use stick figures and geometric shapes—nothing fancy. Try five or six different ideas, sketch them out, and see what comes up.

Once you’ve got a layout you like, you can go into a graphics program and implement it.

Dan:

I mean, you’re kind of talking about storyboarding there.

Connie:

Yeah, exactly. 

Video-type storyboarding.

Dan:

Yeah. But very much like the same idea, where you have— instead of, you know, if you've worked in film or video and you understand that, uh, you know, shots are separated. They're individual shots, but you can visualize them beforehand and do stick figures just like you're talking about—real quick sketches that inform whoever's shooting it or whoever's designing the shot to get basically what your vision is. And so you can do exactly the same thing here.

Where you have—whether it's slides or screens or segments, whatever you want to call it. There's a start point, a stopping point, or maybe there's a, you know, uh, or pieces that are on screen, similar to what you kind of mentioned before, where I want to show a sequence.

Well, how do we want to show that sequence? Do we want to show it horizontally? Do we shoot vertically? Have a nice circle? Is there something on screen that we can point to, you know? And then you can start to pick it apart.

Connie:

Right, and when you pick up a pencil and start drawing, it seems to channel another type of creativity.

And, um, and no one has to—you know, in the case of if you're trying to give it to a graphic designer, they will have to see what you're doing. But a lot of times people are working on in a department of one or two, and they just implement what they, um, what they storyboard. So, you know, a lot of times no one has to see it, because a lot of people are embarrassed to show people their sketches.

Dan:
Well, that question that I just asked you was about some common challenges. But another one that I wanted to ask you was: are there some practical ways that instructional designers can enhance their skills? It seems like one of those things would be picking up pencil and paper or something, and sketching, and getting some of those ideas out.

While what you may create be something very specific to the thing that you’re working on, I have to think that the practice of doing that over and over again, will lead to some good habits, or some good ideas for you in enhancing your skills.

Connie:
I agree. And also, you can—if you have them in a spiral-bound sketchbook—you can go back and look and go, “Oh, I thought of that idea a year ago. I didn't use it, but I could use it on this project.” You know, here it's essentially, um, you're tracking and recording possible ideas. So that's great too.

I also just diagram content. You know, I just go, "Let's see, this goes with that, but that would go with this," and it really helps you think ideas through because our working memories are very limited. We can only hold three to four things in mind at one time.

So by putting it on paper, it's a cognitive aid.

But some of the other ways to get over the challenges—one is lack of inspiration. Online, you know, learning to become aware of visual design all around you. Online, there are lots of websites where you can get ideas.

I have approximately 100 graphic design books behind me. When I'm stuck, I'll just start going through them.

And the basic principles of visual design are not that hard to learn: contrast, unity, visual hierarchy, colors, you know, a pleasing color palette.

So any good graphic design book is going to teach that. The reason I speak of visual design rather than graphic design is because often graphic design is working in the world of advertising, marketing, web design. And especially in advertising, you can be really clever—but we can't, sadly,

Uh, we're thinking of like, how can people understand this and construct knowledge? So we have to be pretty clear. And I can have all kinds of cool ideas and go, “Nope, that won't work.” And even if I think it would work and it's humorous, then my clients say, “Nope, we're not going to joke about that.”

Dan:

I think there’s a lot of us in L&D who come from different fields—who originally got their start in so many different places. And through some journey and happenstance, we end up being the people who are asked to either teach something, build something, organize something, or maybe all of the above.

Like, me personally—I started professionally in web design. And that’s, you know… so I was studying not just web design, but also usability. And I was designing things all the time.

Uh, you know, I learned a lot from Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, and, um, you know, that was really eye-opening for me. But personally, I also had experience in independent filmmaking. And so I had a lot of practice—not just shooting video and editing video, but also the idea of scripting and storyboarding, and getting your ideas out, uh, you know, in sketch form and everything.

So for me, it kind of—it helped because the two sort of came together naturally. This online design and visual experience that I had—and also the personal interest in teaching. I was interested in it. And so that kind of brought me to it. And I’ve been in the field ever since.

But I think that a lot of people, they could come from all over the place. And so, you mentioning that perhaps, you know, all it takes is some exposure to, uh, you know, basic visual design foundational elements… Yeah.

So that you can get a better idea about, you know, what is the Rule of Thirds, and how is contrast important, and, you know… Is that all people need? Like, is that a good way—an introduction for people, or maybe even a refresher—for people who are trying to figure it out?

Connie:

I think there are three components to that.

One is—I did write a book called Visual Design Solutions, and that one is for learning professionals. But there are other really good ones that are more geared toward graphic design. One is Robin Williams—I think everyone knows her—she writes lots of visual design books, and those are good. Mine is geared towards learning, but there are just so many on the market that, you know, as you can see, I have a lot of them.

So I think there are three components. One is learning the principles.

Another is practicing like crazy—really practicing and focusing and working on it. Actually, I'm going to throw in one more that goes with that: not comparing yourself to professional designers. Graphic designers who work at this maybe 50 hours a week, probably have a degree in it—at least a two-year degree. I mean, these people… you may not get to the point where you design like them. So just forget about it.

Instead, compare your work to your previous work. Work on it for six months. Work on using and applying those principles. Then look back at your previous work—that's how you'll see that you've improved.

And the third component is raising your consciousness or your awareness of design in the world around you. So if you're riding a bus or a metro subway, look at the ads—how did they arrange them? What do they want you to look at first? Do the same thing when you get junk mail, when you look at a magazine, when you look at websites.

Everything was probably made by a graphic designer who knows those principles. Now, they're not all great. When you see something you don't like—when you see white text on a light gray background—say, "Well, I'm not going to do that. I can barely read it, let alone someone with low vision." So, you know, see things that don't work and keep a note of those too.

But you'll find lots of good ideas when you raise your awareness of visual design in the environment.

Dan:

That's great. I want to wrap up our discussion today with something that—you know, we've been talking a lot about how we can improve ourselves and what we can do to improve things and all that.

One way that we can also improve is by listening to feedback and understanding what the learners’ experience is and their satisfaction with what we've built.

So, what are some ways that we can get feedback on the visual design of what we've built so that we can iterate and improve, and really hit our mark?

Connie:
You know, I'm so glad you mentioned that because a lot of times someone will say to me, "Do you think this would be better, or that would be better?" And my answer is: it doesn't really matter what I think—go talk to the learners. Show it to them.

I remember in graduate school, they taught us something like—even just talking to one person—it wasn't about visual design but just in general—can improve your work a lot.

So what I recommend, and a lot of people recommend this, is making prototypes.

Your prototype—a look-and-feel prototype—you know, there are so many different kinds. One would just be about how interactions work. But another kind of look-and-feel prototype would have your user interface design, your palette, and an example of the style of images that you want to use.

Because some courses are going to really focus on photographs, others will be vector graphics or those illustrated graphics that can increase in resolution up and down. It doesn’t matter.

So I would gather that stuff. You know, maybe you want a sketchy style, a casual style. Maybe it's for bank executives, and it’s a very formal style.

You want to get some sample members of the audience, show them your prototypes, and talk to them. Of course, you have to talk to clients—internal or external—too. But it's great to get feedback from audience members—a small sample of five to seven people.

Well, you know, do you like this? Some people might say, “I'm offended, actually.” And you go, “What?” And they’ll say, “Yeah, that graphic…” You know?

And they'll tell you why they're offended, and you may not have even known it. Or you may write instructions, and they go, “I have no idea what to do.” And you’ve spent one hour writing that one sentence!

So you never know until you run it by the learners. I'm really glad you brought up that point.

Dan:
That's so true. If they don't like it, it's not going to work at all, right?

Well, I want to thank Connie Malamed for joining us today. Again, you can find her work over at theelearningcoach.com. And I know I've said that like 10 times, so if you haven’t checked it out yet, please go do check it out.

What are some other spots where people can learn about you and follow you?

Connie:
I have a community at masteringid.com, where I teach instructional design principles.

breakingintoid.com is a free e-learning course—an email course—about the career in instructional design, because a lot of people don't know what they do.

And then I'm on Twitter… Twitter/X… at elearningcoach and LinkedIn—you can find me. So that’s about it.

Dan:
Awesome. Lots to learn, lots to choose from there. Thank you so much, Connie, for joining us today.

Connie:
And thanks for having me. Great conversation.

Dan:
Hey everyone, thanks for watching this episode of the L&D Explorers Podcast. If you enjoyed it, please give it a like and subscribe because more episodes are on the way.

And no matter what your learning and development goals are, GoSkills can help. Click the link in the description to find out more.

And thanks again for watching.