Storytelling has been a buzzword in eLearning circles lately – and for good reason. Everyone loves a good story and they are a great way to put new information into a familiar context, provide feedback, and run through possible scenarios. I know I always remember more from a story than I do from a list of bullet points.
This week’s eLearning challenge was to visually tell a story with a photo collage. The submissions so far have been all over the map in style and use of pictures, so be sure to check them out. Spoiler: I decided to go the route of presenting a scenario with feedback in a comic book/pop-art style.
So, what’s the story?
Since this challenge was story based, I decided the story was the best starting point. But I was feeling a little stuck. The return of miserably cold weather has effectively shut down my brain which was terrible timing since I had a lot going on this week.
So I decided to just create a quick and easy scenario based around how a manager might deal with a major employee error. Why that scenario? Who knows. It is just what popped into my head.
I came up with four different ways that a manager might respond to a crisis stemming from employee error – blaming, helping, fixing, and ignoring – and went from there.

Winter, Managed. (or: Visual Design)
Without a lot of time to spend on the challenge, I decided to use the only photographic character Storyline has built-in. She has a ton of great poses, way more than the illustrated characters, so I was able to find a pose that perfectly illustrated her freaking out over a problem, and then each of the four possible reactions.
Once the characters were on-screen, I found that they were really boring. I mean, it was just a white page with five different images of the same lady, each in her own box. It was just a little too plain Jane, Brady Bunch for my taste.
Since winter doesn’t seem to want to die, I decided some bright colors were in order. I started to play around with possible backgrounds and found a really great pop-art like combo of a red and a yellow that I loved. Text then was placed in white speech bubbles or boxes, just like in a comic.
For fonts I used:
- Segoe Print (my quick go-to for a handwriting-like font) for the speech bubbles.
- Tandelle (a nice, tall, dark, sans-serif font that looked like it might belong in a comic) for the feedback.
- I almost went with Stereofidelic for the feedback, but it was just a little too much.
John, Managed. (or: The Finished Product)
Here one image from the finished product. To see all the possible outcomes, view the demo. Don’t worry, it’s short and sweet – like winter should be.

Like it? Inspired? Got a better idea? Let me know!
Great demo, Allison. The pop art style works really well and you couldn’t have found a better use for the photographic character poses. Thanks for sharing your ideas!
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Thanks David! I enjoyed the visual design part of this challenge a lot.
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Super ideas.
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Thank you for sharing, Allison. Really nice. Sparks some ideas for a project I’m working on now. Love how constraints forced a creative response. Would love to hear your thoughts on my recent blog post and how you use constraints on other projects. http://rance2ya.wordpress.com/2014/03/28/design-within-constraints/
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