Branding Guidelines
Following branding guidelines is not always easy for former teachers who are used to designing their own classroom materials. My routine was to hop on SlidesCarnival or SlidesGo for inspiration and then creating attention grabbing slide decks.
In the corporate world, you have to stick with the branding guidelines. The fonts, colors, PPT designs, photographs, and icons will be pre-determined.
One mistake I made early on was trying to design things that were too “pretty.” I actually got feedback from a manager to make my eLearning less whimsical and more corporate. My team recently had a little competition to create new intro and outro video clips for all of our video learning and the winner was the individual who best embraced the corporate style guide (props to Natalie Ellis!)
This could be a good challenge for your digital portfolio. For example, I built product training videos using Twine’s branding as if I worked for them, although that platform doesn’t have any employees.
To be able to visually communicate in the voice of your organization takes skill. It’s still creative, just with some parameters. Instead of thinking of it as stuffy, think of it as an integral part of the job.
