Discover 16 graphic creation tools to give your training content a boost!
Just like many other areas in life, training content is shaped by both style and substance.
Your training content plays a key role in transferring knowledge and enhancing learners’ skills, but it’s also important to pay careful attention to visual aspects! These will allow you to showcase your content, arouse interest among learners, illustrate your words and liven up drier content.
It might take you a while, especially if you don’t have any particular skills or experience in design or if you have little time and few resources to dedicate to it.
With this in mind, we’ve put together a list of the best content creation tools on the market to help you create irresistible, eye-catching visuals.
Free image bank
Pexels
Pexels supplies high-quality photos under a Pexels licence, completely for free. All photos are categorised, indexed and easy to find. Hundreds of thousands of free photos are added each day. The photos are selected from images uploaded by users or taken from free image websites. Pexels ensures that all the photos posted are top quality and fully licensed.
Pixabay
Discover more than 1.8 million free, high-quality images shared by the Pixabay community. This dynamic group of creatives shares images and videos without copyright. All content is posted under Pixabay licence, making it safe to use without requesting permission from the artist or crediting them.
Pinterest
Rather than images as such, what you’ll find on Pinterest is inspiration. The website combines social networking with photo sharing and allows users to share their interests and passions through albums of photos that they’ve unearthed online.
Visuals
Canva
Canva is a free tool that allows you to create superb visuals very easily, without any specific design knowledge. Canva allows users to create graphics for social networks, presentations, posters and all kinds of other visual content. It is available online and on mobile devices and features millions of images, fonts, templates and illustrations to inspire you.
Genially
Genially brings your content to life by allowing you to create interactive visuals that you can add your chosen media content to.
With Genially, you’ll discover the new generation of presentations, infographics, dossiers, video-presentations, ePosters, CVs, quizzes, etc. Everyone can create incredible visual stories and wonderful communication experiences.
Tiki Toki
Tiki Toki allows you to create interactive timelines online from your browser. Tiki Toki is the only tool to offer 3D timelines, with plenty of customisable templates available for you to choose from.
Venngage
Venngage is a free tool that allows you to create infographics and other designs without using InDesign or Illustrator.
Photopea
Photopea is a photo editor that is very similar to Photoshop. This free, online tool helps you to quickly retouch your raster and vector photos! The software supports most image formats, including PSD files, Sketch files and GIMP files.
Thinglink
Thinglink offers a simple way of creating interactive images and videos. It functions by letting you insert points into an image of your choice that you can then attach additional content to. There are numerous options: text, links, images, videos, sounds, maps, social media posts, etc.
Colorinch
ColorinchColorcinch is a photo editing and graphic design tool that offers one-click approach to design. With its clean and intuitive interface, you can create stunning creatives for your blog and social media posts in an instant. It comes with hundreds of specialty effects & filters, a premium collection of vector icons, stock photos, and overlays as well as a text editor.
Videos
Powtoon
Powtoon is an animation studio that allows you to create animated videos quickly and easily. You’ll be able to put together beautiful animated presentations that learners are sure to love.
Vyond
Create cartoon-style animated videos in no time at all with Vyond (formerly GoAnimate). Accessible to everyone, this tool is ideal for designing relevant, enriching e-learning content. Drawing on a library of illustrations and animations, you can easily create an animated video.
Presentations
Prezi Present
Prezi Present is a desktop presentation tool from Prezi. The interactive software is available online and offers impressive navigation actions and transitions, as well as allowing you to zoom in and out to enhance the appeal of your presentations. Unleash your creativity to mobilise your learners!
Tutorials
Screencast O matic
With Screencast O matic, you can design video screenshots from your browser. It’s an easy-to-use tool that is regularly used to create modules for digital training courses.
Apowersoft
Apowersoft is a simple, free screen recorder for capturing your on-screen activity, including audio.
OBS Studio
OBS Studio is free, open-source software for screen recording and streaming, available for Microsoft Windows, MacOS and Linux. OBS allows you to record inputs from your whole screen, webcams or even specific windows. It works equally well for recording and live streaming.
Additional content
Padlet
Padlet is an online application for creating ‘virtual walls’, either alone or in collaboration with others. You can add images, text, sounds, links and videos to your ‘wall’.
Finally, here are a few tips to help you make sure your new visuals are a success at your next training session:
#1 Maintain consistency in your graphics
Make sure you use just one or two main colours and ensure that the fonts are all the same so that your learners can quickly identify your training material.
Consistency should be maintained between different formats and materials.
#2 Use appropriate illustrations
Choose images carefully to fit your words or help your learners understand your content.
#3 Use text-based content
Highlight key words so that your learners remember them! To liven up your presentation, it’s important to vary the type of text-based content that you use to hold learners’ attention: texts, key figures, varied formats and sizes.
#4 Make sure your sources are reliable
To ensure credibility, double-check your sources so that you’re completely certain that they’re accurate.
#5 Have fun
Create visuals that you enjoy, that inspire you and that you’ll be proud to show off to your learners.
