By Hattie Wiley, National Weather Service

After some miraculous effort on your part, you create an acceptable piece of training for your requestors, but then, they want more branding. You want what?

Now, you could, for your, part just "logo bomb" the entire piece, dropping that corporate logo on every bit of white space that once brought comfort and sanity to your design. You could just add the logo to the upper right corner crowding that header or footer…

… OR you could flip the script. Try on yet another hat as we fabulous instructional designers so often do! Today, you are in marketing, and it is time to think “casual product placement.”

Add some corporate flare to your stock characters with some casual logo “patches” and “pins”. Maybe create a logo “sticker” and casually decorate some laptops, backpacks, etc… Perhaps even add a semi-transparent logo to some t-shirts to give them the faded look.

Another good technique is to add some branding colored lines and geometric shapes in the background.

Also, did you know how easy it is to isolate a stock art person’s clothing in PowerPoint, recolor it, and then copy it on top of the original, to make your stock people look like they are wearing corporate colors? 

Just use remove background image to erase everything except the clothing. For more information, see the section on recoloring clothing in the crop out/cutouts YouTube video.

Save yourself some time if you use any of these strategies by adding your alt tags the first time you add logos or decorative pieces. Then, copy and paste the same elements if you are using MS PowerPoint or grab the image from your media library if you are using Articulate Storyline so that you stay 508 Compliant.

Be creative!

Hattie Wiley, Ph.D., works as an instructional design specialist for the National Weather Service.  Her duties include consultation, training, and coaching in all aspects of project management, instructional design, performance development, and educational technology. In addition, she designs and developments on-site and online training for a variety of subject matter. Her specialties include leadership development, governance, interactive online training, and internal (training department) training.

She has over 20 years of combined academic, corporate, and government experience in the eLearning, training, and leadership development industry. 

Her academic interest lies in the intersectionality of complexity science, action research, and instructional design. She is currently working on turning her dissertation, “The Broadening of Leadership Development Science through Complexity Science and Action Research”, into a book - Wicked ISD. Her dissertation was published as open access in ProQuest at https://www.proquest.com/openview/3b0f429e125d044efab5691e196adf26/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y.  Her doctorate is from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS).