Visual Design and Instructional Effectiveness

Abstract

The paradigms of old media are replaced by new forms of creativity and delivery of content by those who strive to enhance innovative ways of communication and learning based on universally accepted guidelines. These ubiquitous rules of design are what scholars in the field of call as the principles of design. Particularly when instructional effectiveness of a new message is under close lens, instructional designers unanimously accept and implement these design principles in the process of planning and designing products for consumers and/or learners.With today's digital revolution and technological break-throughs, instructional designers need to keep seeking new forms of design, communication, and learning with various forms of instructional media and innovative, technology-rich design techniques. Given this educational milieu in an ever-growing digital world of learning and instruction, this paper will focus on eliciting some of these most innovative and outstanding instructional design (ID) products and evaluate their effectiveness in learning and teaching environments based on an array of ID principles generally accepted by the scholars of the field.Keywords: visual design, instructional design (ID), communications, learning, teaching, English as a Second Language (ESL), ESL learning and teaching environments, adult learners IntroductionAccording to Costello, Youngblood, and Youngblood (2012), "the principles of design can be thought of as the recipe for combining elements within a visual space" (p. 71). In this digital era where old theories, pedagogies, and methodologies of learning and instruction are superseded by new means and technologies of communication and learning, what calls for is an outside-the-box type of thinking that should shake these outdates models of normal science from its grassroots. As such, it is impossible to underestimate the role of today's digital revolution in education, especially with the surge of the Internet and the World Wide Web, in addition to other emerging multiple forms of media through which information is disseminated and shared in an online, digitized network and in an open system. With the digital revolution breaking through, therefore, instructional designers need to keep seeking new forms of design, communication, and learning with various forms of instructional media and innovative, technology-rich design techniques. Given this educational milieu in an ever-growing digital world of learning and instruction, this paper will focus on eliciting some of these most innovative and outstanding The examples to these static illustrations include "drawings, charts, graphs, maps, or photos, and dynamic graphics such as animation or video" (Clark & Mayer, 2011, p. 70). The designers of this website seem to have applied these visual design principles in line with the authors' visual design-related guidelines. UnityAccording to Costello et al. (2012), unity is an essential ingredient of visual design, and they described it "as the perceptual glue that holds a design together a...