Creating visually impactful and accessible solutions to support BetterLesson’s Learning Design team in crafting professional learning and development materials
Category: Branding Design, Graphic Design, Iconography
Role: Graphic Designer
Tools: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Google Slides
About BetterLesson and the Learning Design Team
BetterLesson connects K-12 educators with comprehensive professional learning solutions that help them thrive in an increasingly complex world. They have partnered with more than 30,000 educators across 47 states, plus D.C., Puerto Rico, and five countries internationally. Through research-based professional development centered on student outcomes, educators gain the necessary skills to create meaningful student-centered learning experiences that meet all students’ needs.
To ensure the useful, usable, and delightful experience for educators and education professionals, the Learning Design team utilizes research-based principles, best-in-class content providers, and subject-matter experts to design BetterLesson’s professional learning experiences. They consider all core users — instructional coaches, principals, district leaders, as well as BetterLesson contract coaches and facilitators — when creating the right solutions and content assets to deliver BetterLesson’s mission.
My Responsibilities
As the Graphic Designer, I supported the Learning Design team by producing 120 fresh design assets, ensuring alignment with BetterLesson’s brand, prioritizing accessibility at every stage of the design process, and establishing effective project organization and navigation.
Given the extensive volume of requests and files, I devised a comprehensive approach to enhance the internal navigation of all Learning Design assets:
outlining project details and including necessary collaborators in Asana,
assigning each project a unique job number for organization and file management within a shared Google Drive folder,
ensuring each project folder contained an asset library with AI/PSD master files and various graphic formats,
implementing file naming conventions to allow for searchability, and
creating formatted Google Slide templates that incorporated the new graphic and requested text, citations, etc.
In addition to crafting visually appealing designs, I concentrated my efforts on accessibility through the following actions:
assessing the feasibility of creating graphics directly in Google Slides for easy modification and usability,
incorporating alt text for all images,
ensuring legible font sizes, and
carefully selecting color combinations to enhance user experience.
Lastly, the various icons that I created for the Learning Design team led to an opportunity to use them outside of this context. These adaptable design elements proved invaluable, allowing for use across a spectrum of media and communication channels, including slide decks, social media content, advertisements, one-pagers, and more.
Before and After Deliverables
Below are some featured pieces I created that facilitated the Learning Design team in communicating their core concepts. As you scroll to the end of each gallery, you can find the original request from the Learning Design team.
Scarborough’s Reading Rope
Initially using the original illustration from the published journal, Handbook for Research in Early Literacy, the Learning Design team deemed it necessary to develop a BetterLesson-branded rendition. They specifically requested that each section of the rope should have an icon and to use the largest font size feasible to optimize legibility for screen-readers, despite the substantial amount of content.
Mathematical Proficiency Diagram
The Learning Design team requested branded icons, consistency with Scarborough’s Reading Rope, and a simplified version for easy reference during professional development sessions.
Week One Culture vs. Continuous Cultivating Classroom Culture
Wanting to showcase how continuous efforts are required to create a successful classroom culture, the Learning Design team wanted to convey this cultivation through a sunflower.
“What Resonates” Visual
For facilitators to gain quick insight into how participants are feeling, build community, and cater to individual needs, it was essential to create a graphic that resonated with common emotions. Although the Learning Design team envisioned something similar to the “blob tree” illustration from the Illinois Civics Curriculum, I considered it vital for this graphic to be more descriptive and applicable, opting for a comic-like illustration style.
Direction to Visit a Resource Graphic
Desiring a graphic to complement slides guiding participants to a resource, the Learning Design team provided several examples of where this graphic would reside. Recognizing that multiple slides would feature this graphic, I decided to incorporate a wide array of icons and color variations to align with the commonly used colors in the BetterLesson slide decks.
Read, Think, Talk, Write Cycle
Pulling from the Transformational Literacy: Making the Common Core Shift with Work That Matters research paper, the Learning Design team aimed to create two distinct branded versions of the diagram: one that gave an overview and another that held the explanations for each part of the cycle. With the versatile icons that I created before, I was able to integrate them into this graphic.
OUR/IM Curriculum Structure
While the initial graphic provided by the Learning Design team was functional, they requested an editable and animated alternative directly made in Google Slides that would illustrate the many layers of a curriculum structure.
