Lindsey Mullins is an instructional designer working at one of the biggest retail brands in the United States. Together with her team, Lindsey uses Piktochart to enhance digital communication in their organization and to create learning and development training content.
We featured Lindsey in our latest #PiktoChat episode to find out more.
Life before Piktochart: Embracing digital transformation
Lindsey’s organization went through a digital transformation in the past few years. Before the change, her role was to create instructor-led learning content. With the digital transformation, their training material evolved from paper-based to fully digital e-learning. This sparked the need to create visual resources. This is how Piktochart soon fell on their radar.
The first visual created by Lindsey in Piktochart was for her organization’s leadership development program. That’s when she fell in love with the platform. From there on, Lindsey started receiving multiple requests to create visuals. She started creating them not only for training purposes but also for event posters that her organization was using at their retail stores nationwide.
“I use Piktochart every day in my role, whether it is creating a reference for e-learning or visual communication for something we’re trying to communicate out to our field. I use it for everything.”
The importance of visual communication for instructional designers
Visual communication is vital for instructional designers.
As a learning and development team at her organization, Lindsey constantly needs to create new training content. However, according to her, not every training has to be conducted as a training session. Part of her role as an instructional designer is to create a learning solution for her organization’s issues.
This is where visual communication can help. Lindsey can communicate the learnings out to her learners more effectively, rather than recommending an entire learning program. Visual communication excites the employees and gets their buy-in quickly as the learnings can be effectively communicated within a few seconds.
Another type of visual communication used by Lindsey are presentations that she creates using Piktochart. Through these presentations, she can communicate the root cause and solutions for her organization’s issues and formally present them to her stakeholders. The large amount of presentation templates on Piktochart makes it simple for Lindsey and her team to create professionally-looking presentations that convince their stakeholders.
Life after Piktochart and how it benefited the organization
In Lindsey’s words, “We’ve modernized the look and feel and branding standards – it’s completely different from what we had before.”
She was particularly appreciative of the ability to include her organization’s branding with the templates using the brand assets feature allowing her to customize the templates.
“The professionalism of the templates and things you can create in Piktochart is way different than something that you’re creating from scratch.”
Another huge benefit of Piktochart is the rapid speed of creating visuals to meet tight deadlines while fulfilling an immense amount of workload. “Within Piktochart, the templates can be customized to create a beautiful and professional visual using half the time with a different program or when starting from scratch,” says Lindsey.
Lindsey has created many visuals using Piktochart and one of her proudest creations is her first-ever visual created for her organization’s leadership development program. Not only was she able to design something professional quickly, but she also managed to get her whole team a subscription with Piktochart after that successful milestone.
Through Piktochart for Teams, they were able to collaborate and use the visuals created by Lindsey. This feature was beneficial as Lindsey thinks that all instructional designers have a secondary role as graphic designers due to the number of visuals such as posters and flyers they have to create. Piktochart helps Lindsey and her team to expand their skill and talent in visual communication.
Top three visual communication tips for instructional designers
With the increasing interest by instructional designers for Piktochart, here are the top three visual communication tips from Lindsey to consider when using Piktochart:
- Utilize branding by uploading the fonts, colors, logos, and other assets into Piktochart templates for ease of use.
- Use templates as an inspiration. When you get a new design request, first look for templates on Piktochart as a source of inspiration. Once the content from the request is understood and digested, instructional designers can then look at Piktochart templates to determine how to break out the content. Lindsey’s pro tip is to customize and combine design elements from two templates for those who are torn in between selecting a template.
- Utilize whitespace and be intentional with the design. Every instructional designer’s goal is to create a visual for the course attendee to take away the message that was meant to be communicated. This can also be further achieved by utilizing graphics that speak to the content and visually relay the information. At the end of the day, the audience should have a clear take away from the visual.
We’re incredibly grateful to Lindsey for joining us in this episode of #PiktoChat!
