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Is Marsala a Good Color for George Washington?

December 22, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 11 Comments

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This week’s Articulate challenge is to use marsala – Pantone’s color of the year – as the primary color in a template or interaction. (Is it my fault that was the only guidance we got?)

The Idea

First, marsala just looks like lipstick to me. I don’t get “cocoa” or “wine” or anything else from it. So I googled lipstick history to see if I could find something to play with.

That’s when I discovered that at least one prominent gentleman in our nation’s history used to wear it. Naturally I wondered what he’d look like in marsala, and the rest is – of course – history.

The Colors

In addition to marsala I used three colors inspired by the Pantone color pairings David Anderson supplied, but I made up new names for them. “Cherry tree” is my favorite, but I’m equally proud of “venison” and “war”.

Enjoy!

I hope you like it. This may be my favorite challenge entry so far. I’m also pretty happy that I have an interaction ready to go for Presidents Day! If you haven’t already, you can check it out right here.

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The 12 Days of Data Presentation

December 21, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 10 Comments

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This week’s ELHChallenge is to present data using interactive charts and graphs. With just 4 days until Christmas, I succumbed to the theme.

What to Chart?

There are a million Christmas-related things you could present, but I kept it light and charted the gifts given in the song The 12 Days of Christmas. I’ve never paid much attention to the totals in it, so the sheer mass by the end was a little eye-opening.

How to Chart It?

I went for a simple slider that lets the user choose the day and see the resulting total for all gifts given to that point. I tried to provide enough visual interest and information to make the concept clear – but it does assume familiarity with the song.

The Gift of a New Challenge Year

I’m hopeful that none of us give or get quite this many gifts, but I’m looking forward to the gift of a whole new year’s worth of ELHChallenges – and I hope you are too!

Giving and Getting Free (and Beautiful!) Images

December 18, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 10 Comments

If you’re an Articulate E-Learning Hero who’s also a designer you need good images and appreciate the benefits of a community whose members share their work and expertise.

The morgueFile Community

You probably know morgueFile as a place to get free images, but I never knew their intention was to have a give-one-take-one sort of self-sustaining community. I thought their contributors were professional photographers and it never even occurred to me they’d want my contributions!

Since I’ve used some of their community’s photos to good effect for recent Articulate #ELHChallenge demos about digital magazines, freelancing tips, and ways to survive the holidays – I thought it would be fun to give back, too.

A Quick & Easy Way to Contribute

(Update: I’m no longer seeing the app or finding images I’ve contributed – but they’ve still got lots of images you can use!)

Last week I found out about their morgueFile #Quest app for iPhone*. Each day they issue a daily challenge (“red” for example), you snap a photo to answer it, upload it, and voilà! You’ve shared your work in a quick and easy way that helps both you and others.

Lucky for me I took a week of vacation right after discovering the app, so I had time to play with it and had oodles of fun taking pics and entering them into current and past challenges. You can see some of them on this page and get a glimpse of my vacay at the same time!

The Win-Win-Win-Win-Win

Not only do I find it more motivating to take pics with the app like this, but I get to be creative in a different way, I have more photos to use for my own projects, I have new sources of inspiration, and it makes me happy knowing that someone else might benefit from these little bits of color and light I’m sharing too.

If this sounds like fun, you might want to give it a try! They even have a Classroom where you can learn more about the basics of photography and how to take better pics, if that’s your goal.

*You don’t need the app to contribute to the site, of course! You can upload your contributions via any browser.

9 Stress-Free Low-Cost Ways to Enjoy the Holidays

December 6, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 4 Comments

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This week’s Articulate challenge is to come up with some ways to help survive the holidays.

How could you be stressed around this guy?

What’s so Stressful?

To be honest, I couldn’t think of anything terribly stressful at first. After a bit of pondering I decided that money and high expectations might be the biggest culprits – so I came up with some low-cost (largely no-cost) ideas that don’t have to involve much frenzy.

Have a Peek & Happy Holidays!

I dipped into MorgueFile again for the images. I love the ones that look “real” as opposed to slick or professional. Feel free to take a peek at my handy little demo right here. Here’s wishing you nothing but wonderful, stress-free holiday delights!

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My 3-Step Formula for Finding Work as a Freelancer

December 3, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 18 Comments

After enjoying My Top 10 Tips for Freelancers for this week’s Articulate challenge, an intrepid reader asked me how to actually get freelance work. A good question, and one I’m happy to address.

My Flavor of Work

Freelance work comes in a lot of flavors, but for me it means that an organization’s training department sets me up as a vendor and has me handle e-learning projects from stem to stern, including all design and development. Even if your desired freelance work looks a bit different, you can still benefit by using this approach.

My 3-Step Formula for Success

There’s a lot involved in each of these steps, but this is what it boils down to.

Step 1: Be Irresistible

As a baseline we’ll assume you know your field, have honed your skills to an outstanding level and continue to learn more all the time, conduct yourself as a consummate and highly-principled professional, understand the basics of being independent, and are so fantastic to work with – both personally and by producing an outstanding product that provides real value – that your clients can’t resist hiring you.

Having all of this together means that once you have their attention, they’ll never want to let you go.

Step 2: Be Discoverable

If your prospective clients can’t find you and your work, how will they discover that you’re irresistible? You need a website where you show off your fantastic skills in the form of jewel-like samples of your work, maintain an active blog where people can get to know how you think and solve problems, and essentially reveal exactly who you are in a professional and best-foot-forward sort of way – which includes using your own name and picture.

Step 3: Be Involved

Choose your community and start contributing. The Articulate community is the one I’ve chosen to be involved with. That’s where I’ve learned oodles of stuff, gotten to practice my design and software skills while simultaneously creating portfolio pieces in the weekly challenges, and gotten to know my peers in both the challenges and discussions. We’re also actively in touch on LinkedIn, where it’s only natural to get to know even more good people in the field. I also attend e-learning events and webinars and continue to learn as much as I can from all of my smarty-pants peers who are ridiculously generous in sharing their experience and knowledge.

How Does All of This Lead to Work?

It just does. Whether it comes from your peers who know of a project you might be right for – or from those silent watchers in the community, on your website, on Twitter, LinkedIn, or wherever else you’re active – the people with the work will find you.

So that’s my secret formula. No “networking” events, no mailing lists, no advertising, no sweat, and no hassle. Just hard, focused work doing exactly what you love – and voilà! – you’re a success. Well done.