Icons to get you ready for turkey, snow & ho-ho-ho

Because you all know just how much I love a good icon set, I’m sending along a new list of icons to get you ready for the holidays.  I received all of these either through an email subscription or an RSS feed that I read.  So, thanks to Tutorial 9 and SitePoint for making this elf happy.  As always, read the licensing and read me files to determine just how you can use these guys.

Fall & Thanksgiving

With this icon pack from Tutorial 9, you get 5 icons in PNG format: leaves, pilgrims, a pumpkin, a tree, and a turkey.  Who doesn’t love a goofy turkey that can be repurposed as a Virginia Tech hokie?

Download from: http://www.tutorial9.net/resources/free-icon-pack-november-seasonal-ic ons/

Christmas Pack 1

This adorable little pack of icons from Chico21 on DeviantArt comes with 8 icons for you to use.  They are in PNG format (my favorite!), and you get a Christmas tree, reindeer, stocking with candy cane, chicken and hen (always a  holiday necessity), Santa mouse, Mama and baby bears, and a present.

Download from http://chicho21net.deviantart.com/art/Christmas-Dock-Icons-72393843

Christmas Pack 2

Twenty icons this time from the “Real Christmas 2005″ pack.  These are from Enchanted Labs and come in 3 flavors — no, not cinnamon, ginger, and vanilla — Mac, Windows, and PNG.  If you would like to use these in your system icons, then feel free to use the Mac or Windows options.  But as I always suggest, download the PNGs for the most flexibility in your development projects.

Download from http://enhancedlabs.com/index.php/labnotes/comments/the_real_christmas _05_reloaded/

eLearning and “Scooby-Doo! Where are you?”

I really enjoyed watching Scooby-Doo as a kid.  The original theme song was, of course, the best…”Scooby, Scooby-Doo, where are you?  You’ve got some work to do now.”  As my Technology Tools to Support Learning course finishes up their self-paced interactive learning modules, I was thinking, “Where are you…in your thinking about elearning and self-paced instruction?”  To take you back, though, here’s the video:

For many of us, the past couple of weeks has been an introduction to elearning and many of the students in my course are beginning instructional designers. So, I am hoping that their thinking has evolved over the time we’ve been discussing elearning.  For the module they have been producing in Powerpoint, we have been following quite of bit of the suggestions and guidelines from Tom Kuhlmann at Articulate.  Certainly one of the points that Tom emphasizes in his posts is making content necessary and meaningful for the learning, such as through scenarios, choices, and consequences.

We’ve also discussed many of the points that Steve Alessi and Stan Trollip identify as essential features for computer-based instruction, or tutorials.  These include:

1. Introduction
2. Presenting new information
3. Questioning
4. Judging responses
5. Feedback
6. Learner control
7. Closing/Exiting

In addition, we have discussed terms, such as page turners, and in another post some folks have considered what tools really contribute purposefully to the creation of learning content for this year and into the next.

So where is your thinking now about elearning? What have you learned and what do you still need to learn?  What’s still a little fuzzy for you?  Where are you?

The year’s best presentations: What can we learn?

My Technology Tools to Support Learning course is continuing our overview of elearning this week.  But I also wanted to link elearning to some of the other topics we’ve been discussing over the semester.  As we move from using Powerpoint for presentations to building interactive learning modules, I thought we would consider what we should bring with us from presentations.  Slideshare.net, one of the Internet’s largest archive of slides and presentations, holds a competition each year for the World’s Best Presentation.  The topic for the slides can be on anything.  The winner this year, Dan Roam, built a presentation about healthcare in America, and it’s all written on napkins (sort of).  See for yourself; I’ve embedded it below.

But the second prize, “Sheltering Wings” by Sarah Cullem, and third place,  “Feels Bad on the Back” by Mohamad Faried, are also excellent as well.  These are the overall winners.  There are also winners for different categories. So, you may want to take a look at those, too.  In particular, you might want to take a look at the one for education.  Here’s the list from Slideshare:

• 24 Reasons why Twitter Sucks! in Technology
• Eco-nomics, The hidden costs of consumption in Business in Business
• Simplicity in Creative/Offbeat
• A crime so monstrous in Education
• Who is this guy in About Me

The question…

So after taking a look at a bunch of these (and some of you may have seen them through Twitter, etc. as they came out), I’ve got some questions for you to consider.

1. What can we learn from these presentations about how to design and develop presentations? In other words, what’ the take away for instructional designers?
2. What can we learn about how to present a message to others, particularly when we’re not there to elaborate?
3. How do these (or some of these) presentations echo principles of message design, graphic design, and instructional design?  Or how do they break them usefully?

Let me know what you think.  Jump in and leave your ideas in the comments below.

More icon love. Company’s coming.

If you remember, in my first post, I explained why I loved icon sets and told you what to look for in icons . . . particularly those that are free.  In the next post, I gave you a heads-up on animal icons that are real nice and real cute.  Continuing the series on icons that I love, today, I have for you two sets that are directed toward businesses and corporate uses.

Business sense

In this icon set, there are 10 icons that are primarily directed toward business and money.  As you can see from the screen capture to the right, you can download the images individually for Windows and Buddy icons or as PNGs in 2 sizes.  I recommend the PNGs in both sizes, because it gives you options when you go to use them in your web pages, presentations or word processing documents.  Admittedly, there are a couple of unusual and atypical business images in the set, including a casino roulette wheel. Go figure?

When you click on any of these images, they will open into a new browser window with the image sitting all alone by itself.  To download them, all you need to do is right click (control+click on a Mac) and then choose “Save image as…”

Available at Icon Archive

Project Run-and-get-them

This second set of icons are courtesy of Smashing Magazine, which always and I’m mean always has good freebies.  (The theme I’m using right now for my blog is courtesy of Smashing Mag.)  This set was designed by Navdeep Raj and includes 18 images that are targeted toward project management, including icons for project milestones, contacts, clocks and timetracking, charts, and communications.  A good variety that would work well business presentations, such as project updates or even with tutorials for project management software and processes.  The zipped files comes with all 18 images and the original Fireworks files in PNG format (which is Fireworks native format).  The the original files in there, the licensing is a basic “have at it” mentality.  You can use them for personal or commercial projects, and you can edit the originals.

Available at Smashing Magazine

If you like these icons and would like to find more in my collection, then feel free to browse my bookmarks at Jumptags.com.  I also encourage you to stay tuned for more icons I love and where to get them.  Also, if you haven’t already, consider signing up for my RSS feed or email updates in the links on the side.

Icons I love. Fur and feathers.

I told you I would share some icon sets that I really love.  As a quick reminder, I only do free.  So all of these are free downloads.  Today, we’re starting with animals.  Lots of fur and feathers.  Here’s a few sets that I think are super well done and are super easy to use.  These will work in Word, Powerpoint, or on the Web.  Two of these come with the original files, so you can edit them into what you need.  Go on and download.  Nobody’s watching.

Cute Critters

These adorable animals are “painfully cute” as described on the release.  A little heavy on the anime, all of these guys have caricatured features.  So something’s a little larger than everything else.  They are indeed cute, and they well done.  The set comes with two versions of each critter—one with the graduated single color background and one with a transparent background. They can be used in commercial and personal project without attribution, but that’s just not nice.  So go ahead and tell everybody where you got them from.

Available from Tutorial9.com

Birds 1

These cute little birds are one set of friends that could be used with Twitter or stand alone.  They are really friendly and round, so they would be great with K-12 kids, teachers, or even with newsletters.  There are a total of 8 images, even though only 5 are in the image at the right.  With these icons, you’re going to get the vector Illustrator (.ai) file for editing, along with EPS files.  So, these certainly have the potential to be used with print materials.  You also get the PNG files in three sizes (128, 256, & 512).  So they could be used as dominate images on slides or a web page.

Available from Mirkku

Birds 2

I used a screen capture of these Twitter birds in my last post on icons.  But I thought I would go ahead and given you a heads up on the full set.  There are 5 different birds with this set, and they each have fun names, like Roger, Nola, and Squidge.  For each character, you’re going to get your money’s worth, though.  You’ll get a Twitter badge, like the one to the right  You’ll get icons (PNGs) at a couple of different sizes.  You’ll be getting larger images, just silhouettes, and Photoshop (.psd) files for each character.  There’s 40 images in all.  So, this is well worth the download.  Because these birds are all whimsical, these are fun to use with less-than-serious topics, and they have really nice unity among the images to be used across design project.  The colors are a little muted, and there is a range of different colors.  So, lots of possibilities and play in the color schemes that could be used.  Plus, the licensing on these is pretty wide open, too.  A link back is appreciated but not required.

Available from Function Web Design

That’s it for today.  Three fun, cute, and furry or feather sets of icons for you to download and put to good —or no good— use.  Do you have some icons that you like?  Let me know what you like and where to get ‘em down in the comments.

Icon sets. I have just 4 words for you: Fab-u-lous and free.

Okay that’s 5 words.  Technically, 3.  But, I love collecting icons, and most of the time they come in sets.  I probably have somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 50 sets of icons that have anywhere from 4 to 60 icons a piece.  So a rough estimate is somewhere around 800 to 1,000 icons. Admittedly, many of these are the same icon in 3 or 4 different sizes, such as 28 x 28 pixels up to 256 x 256 pixels.  I have bookmarked almost all of them, so check them out.

So what do I do with all of them?  Well, I’ve started using them a lot in presentations.  As I’ve moved to more Presentations 2.0 and emphasizing visual literacy for memory, I’ve begun to use a lot more images — in particular, Flickr Creative Commons and icons to demonstrate ideas.  I even created presentation for Clif Mims using almost all icons.  And since I create quite a few web sites and web pages for courses and professional development that I conduct, I tend to use the icons on these pages as well.

Here is a couple of examples of wiki pages where I used icons from Vistaicons.com and Pasquale D’Silva.  I find that often with a quick site, the icon sets work well because they are all in the same theme, or flavor, and they bring a visual unity to the site with both message and colors.  Plus, if you feel like you don’t have the graphic design know-how to produce quality images, then these high-quality images are a far better cry than screen beans in Office.

City icons on course website

Cute bird icons on course site

Three Tips for Icons

Free is better
I always look for free icons and icon sets.  Free is the new 99 cents.  Sites where I often receive notices about icons are SitePoint, Function, and Smashing Magazine.  I encourage you to subscribe to the RSS feeds/email alerts if for nothing other than the icon alerts.

PNG is where it’s at
I always look for PNG file format.  I’ve found that these have the most flexibility in use for digital presentations and online with web sites.  So the PNG files work with Word, Powerpoint, Dreamweaver, and in PBWorks, too.

Often when looking to download the icon sets they are especially designed for use with your operating systems.  So that you can change the icons for Firefox, Photoshop, and iTunes.  Therefore you will often see them in three flavors: Windows, Mac, and Linux.  Almost always the Linux pack is the PNG pack to download.  You can, of course, download the others for your operating system, but to get the most liberal use of the graphics, don’t overlook the Linux link.

U gotta Readme
Finally, when I download, I always, always, always, look at the Readme file and/or the release statement.  Inside these files are the licensing requirements for using the graphics.  In many cases, the licensing/copyright statement requires that you provide a link back to the distributing site.  In many cases, the statement does not allow you to redistribute the graphics in any manner other than linking to the download page.  In about 50% of the cases, the statement does not allow you to use the graphics for commercial applications.  However, in probably close to 50% of the downloads, the designer has also packaged the Illustrator or Photoshop original files, so that you can alter the images to your liking.  This is the case with the super cute Twitter birds.  Pasquale D’Silva licensed them out for use and derivations at will.

In fact, here’s an example of where I used the original Photoshop (.psd) file to change the icon to suit a blog post I was writing about retweeting and reposting.  (Actually, I used Fireworks, and it all worked fine, too.)

If that’s not enough to get you going on icons, then over the next few posts, I’m going to share some of my favorite icons and icons sets.  So stay tuned, clear out some space on your hard drive, and get ready to “Save image as…”  But if you can wait, then go ahead and download them now.

Are you collecting graphics, icons, or other media?  Share them (and the links) below.  I’m always looking for new media to share.

The power of stars

About a year ago, I found the following slideshow, creating a post about it on a previous —now somewhat defunct — blog. So, I’m reposting it here. It will be able to get archived and found easier. Plus, maybe it will resonate with you.

Consider this slide show on Slideshare: “Knowing.the.World.We.Live.in.” In this slideshow, review it at full screen so you can read the legends for each slide. Another site called this “The Power of Stars.” The message is powerful.  How do you think the message in the presentation is interpreted through visual literacy, graphic design and message design?

Increasing cognitive load without even knowing it

Wikipedia defines cognitive load as “the load on working memory during instruction.” I usually refer to it this way: If your working memory is a bucket, then it can only hold so much stuff. So, filling up your bucket with unnecessary or unimportant stuff, leave less space for the critical stuff and the processing space necessary to work on it.

photo credit: Erlomo

Extraneous cognitive load then is bad all around. It’s not good cognitive load. It doesn’t help you learn. It doesn’t help you process. It doesn’t help you remember. It doesn’t even relate to the learning content in most cases. Instead, it fills up your bucket —read “increases cognitive load.”

One of the most obvious examples of extraneous cognitive load is poor interface usability. When we design a graphical user interface, poor usability forces the learner (user) to have to think about the interface. That is, they have to think about how to interact with the system. When they have to think, the bucket starts getting filled up. If some function in the interface doesn’t behave the way a learner expects it to, then the learner has to think about why and how do I do what I want to do. Working memory continues to be loaded.

Some examples might be in order here. I have seen other university faculty members’ courses that have animations (notice the plural), hyperlinks and supposedly “cute” graphics all on the same single web page. Admittedly, this is amateurish by professional standards. However, for me, the more serious offense is the inconsideration of what it means for learning and cognitive load. Taking a suggestion from “Web Pages that Suck,” a 2008 winner was the Burlington National UFO Center. Similarly, HavenWorks also has created an extraneous cognitive overload with poor layout, organization and unimportant elements. Admittedly, neither of these two sites are strictly instructional and I would never expect any corporate instructional designer to produce this type of development. However, the fact that these pages still exist confirm that learning and utility take a backseat to inexperience.

Where does your inspiration for design come from?

Some examples of items I've collected in my inspiration folder

Sometimes I have a clear picture of how I want to approach a new project.  Other times, it’s open-ended, leaving me without a clear themed direction for the graphic design or instructional design. For a long time, I have kept a simple, nondescript manila folder in the bottom right drawer of my desk.  In it, I collect Sunday circulars, postcards, direct mail flyers, etc., for when it comes time to create a new layout, color scheme, theme or graphic design.  This is akin to interior designers or HGTV-wannabes collating a stack of tear-sheets from magazines.  This is a technique that I learned way back in undergrad when I was print-publishing-and-packaging major.

Even farther back in high school when I was on the yearbook and newspaper staff, we collected headlines from magazines and newspapers that we could reuse.  We used scissors and glue and pasted the headlines into manilla folders.  So whenever we were hard-up for a headline—that is, one that didn’t sound like we were desperate for a headline—we went through the folders.  It was and still is a great technique.

Not long ago, I had a teacher recommend to me that she gets her students to collect really good adjectives and puts these either on notecards on a key ring or in a spreadsheet.  Whenever the kids need to write descriptive paragraphs or just use better adjectives, she gets them to pull them out.

More recently, I’ve begun to collect cartoons and images that I would like to reuse in my instruction.  I use Jumptags to collect my bookmarks, and it also allows you to save images (plus, video and HTML code, too).  So, particularly, now when I’m looking for an image to communicate an idea on a slide or in instruction, I’ll save it into my bookmarks, too.  Just in case I’d like to reuse it or use it as a source of inspriration.

In addition, a few of the blogs that I subscribe to regularly post unique sources of inspiration for designs, such as skateboard designs, photography and typography.  Here’s a list of a few that I am inspired by:

• Smashing Magazine
• instantShift
• Think Design

But here’s a few instructional design, development and elearning blogs that I also use for inspiration:

• Instructional Design and Development Blog
• Rapid eLearning Blog
• eLearning Roadtrip

Where do your inspirations for graphic design, message design and instructional design come from?  Leave some comments and share, please.

Clipart objects. Cool and free. Just the way I like it.

By way of one of my favorite sites for getting things done faster, easier, more effectively or more efficiently (I’m talking about Lifehacker.com), comes a pack of free clip art for presentations, Web pages and word processing.  This simple little pack of icons, things and badges comes by “freeway” of iPresentee.com.  iPresentee describes their freebie pack as:

The background of all objects is transparent and can be used on any colored background. Each object can be changed in size, rotated, increased or decreased in opacity, fitted with shadows or even overlapped with one another to create extra effects. Keynote Objects are compatible with Keynote, iWeb, Pages, Microsoft PowerPoint and Word.

This is just my kind of score: cool and free.  These little gems with a sample of the 100+ above would be easy adds to a presentation, flyer, or Web page.  Props to iPresentee.com.  Kudos to the Lifehacker commenters that solved the download glitch.  Instructions to everyone else: Download away!

• Download the pack for Mac (.dmg)
• Download the pack for Windows (.zip)

You might also like:

1. Free character pack from Function
2. Pics at 4Leaarning.com
3. 31 Sources of quality free icons from Vandelay Design
4. Vanilla Cream icon set by ~djnjpendragon