Seven Tips for Selecting Images for an eLearning Project

How often do you look at a book, course, or blog post and think the content creator could have used a better graphic? I find myself doing that sometimes, and I’m not even a graphic designer. I didn’t even realize I liked or appreciated images. When I was a child, I couldn’t wait to start reading books with only words. It was like a rite of passage to demonstrate you were no longer a baby and could read books without images or illustrations.

I’ve always been more of a work and text person, but in any space where words and text compete, I am drawn towards great images. Images have a way of drawing us out, engaging us, and keeping us interested in what we are learning or reading.

Images and their Value in eLearning

Images are a great way to grab your audiences’ attention. You must have heard it said that a picture is worth a thousand words.’ You might be wondering how true this is when it comes to eLearning design.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words.
Fred R. Barnard

Well, a picture is only worth a thousand words if you choose the right one. Research shows that adding graphics to eLearning can reduce the cognitive load for learners. However, this doesn’t mean you can add just any picture to your eLearning Design. Adding Graphics to designs requires more than ticking a box on your checklist. The graphics we incorporate should be relevant to the contexts in our designs.

How do we select Images for eLearning projects?

Tip One: Reflect What the Brand Wants

When you are creating a project for someone other than yourself, the brand should influence the design. When you think of designs for brands and organizations, think in terms of themes. Does the brand require a dark theme (mostly black base) or a light theme (white base with neutral colors), or a color bomb (light with pops of bold color) theme?

The organization you are working with will likely already have its brand colors, and you should reflect their brand in the theme you select. Dark themes work well with the automobile and tech industry. Light themes work well with financial organizations, healthcare, compliance, and tech. And color bomb themes work well with lifestyle and fast-moving consumer goods. However, you can find ways to make a theme work with any organization. Try to ensure that your images and the theme you decide on reflect what the brand wants.

Dark themes evoke feelings like bold, strong, powerful, exciting, dynamic, mysterious, and cutting-edge feelings.

Light themes evoke words like clean, light, airy.

Color bomb themes evoke words like drama, fierce, fast-paced, colorful, and fun. etc.

Tip Two: Consider your audience

Typically, Instructional designers describe learners in terms of what will influence the eLearning design. Learner characteristics you could consider include age, gender, cultural background, prior education, special needs, and learning disabilities. It is important that the graphics you select reflect your target audience. If the learners consist of a mixed age group, gender, or cultural background, try to reflect them in your chosen pictures. When learners can identify with the images in your design, it improves their engagement and enjoyment of the course.

If, for instance, you learn that your audience consists of learners with ages ranging from 18 – 60, you don’t’ want to create an entire module with characters from only one of the images below. Instead, you would want characters that show the mixed age group.

This is not to say that every single learner characteristic must be represented in your design. However, it does help to carefully consider your audience’s characteristics when you choose your images.

Tip Three: Keep the Project Goal in mind

It is important to select the best graphics to meet the instructional goal and not choose a graphic lightly. Images can be distracting if they don’t relate to the information you are presenting. As you select images for your design, reflect on the content of the text. Planning words and text together might help you choose images more meaningfully. You want to ensure that the graphics you select are present for instructional purposes rather than decorative purposes.

Ask yourself, what emotions do you want to evoke? What message do you want to convey? Looking at the images below, which one would convey the message in the title better?

Never select images simply to fill white space or complete the design. When it comes to eLearning, all images selected must support the learning goals for the project.

Tip Four: Find similar color tones.

When adding images to your design, you want them to look like part of the same family. You don’t want to use images that look jarringly different across your design. Imagine these images in the same design.

Now, take a look at the next set of images. Which group of pictures would you prefer in your design?

Always try to pair images with similar temperatures, tones, and feel in your design if you can’t find matching colors.

What happens if you find images that you like but can’t use because the color tones are different? If the images you want to use vary widely in color, render them in black and white.

I suggest two options:

Change the Images to Grayscale.

Changing all the images to black and white or grayscale could work if your design allows it. Black and white images work very well with the color bomb theme. You could always incorporate the colors of your theme into the design as well.

Use a Solid Color layer as an Overlay.

All you need to do is select a rectangle in a solid block of color, change it to the color you want, and lay it over your design. You will need to look for a way to tone down the transparency of the shape you have used in your overlay. I did this in Canva.

Tip Five: Make the Images Light Weight

There is no need for your eLearning course to be as heavy as a movie file. Heavy files take up a lot of space on a learning management system. Learners could find it frustrating if courses take too much time to load. There are ways around this.

Whenever possible, and if your design allows for it, download files in smaller sizes. Some image websites offer images in three sizes, usually small, medium, and large. When it comes to eLearning design, don’t go high if you can go low. Your learners will thank you.
If you do not need transparency, go for JPEG files instead of PNG, as JPEG files are usually lighter. A single PNG file could go as high as 10MB. 10MB could give you a whole course! Also, with JPEG files, you have more controls and flexibility over reducing the image size.
Resize and optimize your images. If the image you want to use is too large in JPEG or PNG, you have the option to reduce the file size. There are sites you can do this with for free. I’ve used tiny PNG and tiny jpeg. You can upload image files up to 5MB per image and download them in reduced sizes. Files large than 5MB require a subscription.

Tip Six: Combine Images

So, you’ve found the right image, and it’s in the wrong background; what can do you do? If your software allows it, you can detach an image from a background and superimpose it on a different background. Again, I do this in Canva using the background removal tool.

Tip Seven: Take your time

Searching for the right images can be tedious and time-consuming. Unfortunately, unless you can purchase costly images or take your own, you will have to take the time to search. Start early in your project. Ideally, as soon as you know the text that will go on to the slides. Start your search, and if need be, you can use some images as placeholders in your design until you find what works best for your design.

I once heard a story about a graphic designer who designed a flyer for a client who owned a bakery. The goal was to promote her cupcakes. The graphic designer created the flyer and included many beautiful graphics and text, but the bakery received very little consumer response. The graphic designer redid the flyer, but this time, in addition to the beautiful cupcakes images, she added someone eating a cupcake with a smile on his face. The new flyer resulted in increased sales and consumer responses.

Just like graphic designers, instructional designers have to find the right images. The right images for the project can make a tremendous difference.

Wrapping Up Your Design

You might work somewhere where there’s organizational pressure to include decorative images that add no value to your design. Adding images simple for aesthetic Value can be a challenge to navigate. At best decorative images are neutral, but it is possible to go overboard with them and detract from the learning experience. If you are paying for these images, the costs could add up.

In the end, sometimes, the most you can do is include as many best practices as possible when designing your eLearning projects. Applying some best practices is better than not using any.

So happy designing. If you enjoyed this post, you might want to check out my post How to Find Images for eLearning Scenarios.