Creating Graphics for Learning and Performance: Lessons in Visual Literacy

Summary (from the publisher): It's all here! Everything teachers and instructional designers need to know to produce effective, efficient, and appealing visuals for classrooms and training/performance settings - including web-based training and distance learning. This book explains the "process" of graphic design, exploring not only the rules that apply to designing graphics, but also the thinking, experimenting, and evaluating that goes into a good design. Blending information from such diverse sources as instructional design and architecture, graphic arts and ergonomics, the author provides a wealth of examples, exercises, and hands-on activities that reinforce content. Underlying everything is information processing theory and an emphasis on the importance of designing visuals that not only appeal to the eyes, but also support cognitive processes by helping learners select the most important information, organize that information, and integrate it into memory. For teachers and instructional designers.

Review: I read this book as part of a class for my master's program entitled "Technologies to Advance Learning." I was surprised to be spending so much of a class on technology reading about graphics and visuals, but I did find value in this text and see how it would be helpful for teachers, instructional designers, or anyone creating documents or presentations that will be viewed by others. 

The underlying goal of this book is to help the reader become more adept at creating visual messages. The idea is that visual images and graphics can help accelerate the learning process, and using highly effective graphics can help contribute to viewers visual literacy and understanding of the message being conveyed. This book covers everything from very basic principles of visual presentations such as font, color, and shape, and more advanced concepts such as Gestalt principle. Some of the ideas covered seemed like basic common sense, and were things I knew going in, however, they gave me a greater understanding for the reason why they seem like common sense.

I did enjoy learning more about graphic design, a topic I know relatively little about. However, I don't know how effective this book will be for me in terms of real life application. Most of the end of the chapter examples target K-12 students, which is not relevant for me. Additionally, much of the emphasis on effective graphics focuses on enhancing learning for beginning students who are not yet dealing with abstract concepts. I think graphics are not quite as relevant or applicable for college level students, and power point style lectures, as emphasized in this text, are less relevant in the classroom today than more collaborative, discussion-based classes.

Although I did learn many things about the theories and reasoning behind effective visual techniques, such as why certain fonts are more readable than others, why alignment helps viewers, etc., this book is only helpful for people who struggle with figuring out these basic, common sense pointers for visuals on their own. Additionally, while I see the value in learning more about this topic, I question how relevant this training is, in a world where hundreds of well-made, professional graphics can be accessed online for free.

Stars: 3