Become a Savvy Digital Creator
CREATING GRAPHICS
Create awesome graphics for your learning center. No graphic design skills necessary! Canva provides great templates that you can customize to create infographics, social media posts, posters, presentations and more. Create a style guide so the choices for fonts and colors only have to be made once and your center has a recognizable brand across your resources.
DigiComm's Style Guide
STEP 1: CHOOSING COLORS
When trying to figure out what colors to use to represent your center, a great place to start is Adobe Color. On this site, you will be able to apply different color rules and move the handles in the center circle around until you find a combination of colors you like. You can also go under the Explore tab to view already made color swatches. Once you find a set of colors you feel will work, grab the hex codes!
#080033
#99CC33
#003366
#009999
#EC9F39
STEP 2: CHOOSING FONTS
A good rule of thumb when designing graphics is to make sure you don't use more than 3 different fonts! For Digicomm we use Raleway for body text, Oswald for Headlines, and Satisfy as a decorative font. Indicating a specific purpose for each font on your style guide ensures your resources design will be cohesive.
STEP 3: CREATING A LOGO
Abbreviated logo
For majority of branding,
JMU Branding
Slogan Logo
On tshirts, flyers, and
social media graphics
Full name logo
For professional branding,
Outside Branding
Examples
THE WEB BUILDERS
THE WEB BUILDERS
WEEBLY
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10 page limit
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Based on a grid like structure, controls where you can place elements on the page, less customization and creative control
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Can change your URL at any time
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Can change your template at anytime without losing content
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Less of a time committment
Weebly Examples
Media Fellow Kendall Gilman created this site to help freshmen in a writing class create digital stories.
Media Fellow Marlena Luciano maintains this site for her College of Education students who are creating professional portfolios.
Media Fellow Alexa Senio maintains this site to help freshmen honors students create digital stories.
DigiComm created this site as a resource for juniors in Engineering to create professional portfolios.
WIX
Wix Examples
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Unlimited pages
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More creative control over placement and customization of elements
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Places your email address in the URL, unless you purchase your own domain name
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Cannot change your template without losing content
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Has a little bit of a learning curve, good if you have more time to spend working on your site
Media Fellow Amanda Harner maintains this site to help students in an introductory writing class create portfolios and transform their writing into multimedia content.
DIGITAL STORYTELLING
WHAT IS DIGITAL STORYTELLING?
Digital Storytelling is essentially telling a story in a more interactive way through the use of multimedia. Traditional stories are told using primarily text, while digital stories incorporate a balance of text, images, audio, and video elements. Through Atavist's simple templates and drag and drop functionality, digital stories can easily be created by anyone. Atavist incorporates more elements to support a story than just text, images, audio, and video; you can also include Tweets, maps, slideshows, pull quotes, sidebars, tables, charts, parallax images, Instagram posts, Flickr galleries, and buttons. For those looking for more advanced options, Atavist also allows embedding and JavaScript.
