Visual Design Guidance

It goes without saying, but getting users to engage with online content and resources starts with having the correct visual design. Individuals and companies across the world will spend millions of pounds and countless hours learning how to make content work in practice, and importantly, how to engage with their information or brand. We know that you don’t have time to learn everything before creating your project, so we’ve picked out some of our favourite guidance and information to help you make your resource look great.

Making Information Beautiful: Visme

The “Making Information Beautiful” web series from Visme is designed for people who have zero design skills. The series gives you practical and easy tips on how to design content, split into several 10 minute bite-sized episodes.

Visme also has a list of matching colour palettes so you don’t even have to work out what colours go together to make something look amazing!

If you really like online visual design and want to develop these skills for your CV/LinkedIn Profile, Visme run a certified online course. To find out more, visit Visme’s online course page. This is not a requirement for your project.

– Making Information Beautiful
– Visme Colour Palettes

How to use Images Online and Avoid Issues

Have you ever had an image load slowly? Is your data balance on your phone inexplicably disappearing? Is an image online fuzzy so that you cant see what it depicts? Or just fuzzy making a page look bad?

Problems like these occur when an unwary person shares an image without thinking about the image properties and what image types they are using and you can easily make these same mistakes!

This guide is all about what to look for in your images from a technical point of view: what is your image type? how big is it (px)? what’s the file size (kb)? why won’t the background become transparent? and how to avoid these problems for your target audience.

– A Guide to Avoid Technical Problems when Using Images and Graphics

Colour Contrast Checker

When creating your resources, it is vital to consider how accessible they are. Accessibility also considers visual design aspects such as colours and colour contrast.

If the contrast between the colours of the background and the text is not high enough, it can lead to users not being able to read your content well. So even if the information in your resource is great, if most users can’t read it; then it won’t be as impactful!

So to ensure the best quality for your resource, please be mindful of colour contrast when creating your resources. This checker will allow you to use the hex code for the colours you are using, to check complaince with accessibility guidelines.

– Colour Contrast Checker

Copyright Decision Tree

The UoM Library has a helpful decision tree resource which you can use to work out if you can use what you want to. If you have located something and can find information about the licence, this tree will help you decide if you can use it!
This covers images, videos, music, broadcastable material etc. Please note:

“Public Domain” is a specific legal term and is not referring to you accessing things easily on the internet.

If you want to find out how to work out if something has an “open access” or “Creative commons” licence, you need to take a look at our copyright talk on Blackboard.

“OER” means “Open Educational Resource” which is what you are creating, as it will be Open to the world.

– Copyright Decision Tree