TIPS FOR TEACHER DESIGNERS

You will need to include the following in your product

• A cover
• Your Terms of Use and copyright
• Credits page
• Your copyright on each page
• Flatten your images

Your cover can be the most fun to play with, you will be able to have fun with both clip art and fonts. It is also one of the most important parts of your product. Covers need to be eye catching, colourful, functional and professional. Your cover is your biggest selling asset and must be used wisely.

Buyers are spoilt for choice and so you must choose high quality graphics, borders and be selective with your fonts and colour selection. Consider your market and choose graphics to suit.

Setting Up Your Page

To create your product, you will need to set up your PowerPoint size in the design tab. Australian sellers use mainly A4, while the US market uses the Letter Paper size – both will work for the purposes of designing your product.

Most products are set up in portrait mode, however, the choice is yours. You can change this again in the Page Setup on the Design Tab. Once you have your page setup it is time to start ‘inserting’ objects, but firstly we need to set up the slide master.

Setting Up The Slide Master In PowerPoint

Click on the above link and this will run you through how to set up your master slide. This is one of a series of 3 video presentations on YouTube, but they are worth the time investment if you want to master the finer points of using this software. You will find it to be such a time saver.

Youtube

It is so important that you include your copyright in your master so that it appears on every page.

Check that every page is set up the way you want it but opening a new page, the other option is simply to duplicate the page that you want to work on. This is incredibly useful for making task cards etc. If you are happy with what you have set up, remember to save it as a custom Master Template before you begin to start working on your project.

When starting your project it is always best practice to name your file and decide its location on your computer so that you can find it easily when you are working. Remember to save your work after each page.

Creating Your Product

There have been many articles and videos written on the topic, so I am not going to reinvent the wheel here, but I do encourage you to watch the series of videos above and refer to the articles below, they have some fantastic tips for anyone at any level of product creation.

This article by Collaborating in Kinder outlines the steps for creating your products and is a comprehensive blog on the topic of resource creation.

Teaching outside the box, has a great article on other features of PowerPoint that you may like to play around with.

Images, fonts and clipart are the tools that bring our products to life and you don’t need to spend a fortune on these to get started. However, you MUST always bear in mind the legal aspects of copyright and each designers TOU (terms of use) which need to be acknowledged in your products.

I am a huge fan of fonts (to be honest I have way too many lol) and there are some wonderful websites you can visit to get some free for commercial use fonts.

Hungry Jpeg – has some free resources for clipart, fonts and images. They offer bundles and $1 deals and they are a great source of inspiration. My only complaint about the clipart, is that you don’t always get a black and white version of the clipart (however, this can be adjusted using the colour correction feature on PowerPoint)

Creative Fabrica –is similar to Hungry Jpeg plus they have a wonderful initiative for members. Every day there is a free font, SVG file and image file available for 24 hours- All come with commercial licences which are found with your purchase

Choosing Images

I cannot stress enough, that using Google images is not the way to go. You may often breach copyright without being aware. If it is photography or stock images that you are after, I encourage you to investigate the following websites

Librestock – LibreStock saves you time and frustration by letting you search the top stock photo and video sites with just a single search. It’s a multisite search engine, giving you immediate, easy access to the biggest searchable database of high-quality free stock photos and footage on the internet.

Unsplash– a free to join website where you can find free high-resolution photos for your products. From the website “All photos published on Unsplash can be used for free. You can use them for commercial and noncommercial purposes. You do not need to ask permission from or provide credit to the photographer or Unsplash, although it is appreciated when possible.

More precisely, Unsplash grants you an irrevocable, nonexclusive, worldwide copyright license to download, copy, modify, distribute, perform, and use photos from Unsplash for free, including for commercial purposes, without permission from or attributing the photographer or Unsplash. This license does not include the right to compile photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service.”

Tip: How to give credit: Even though credit isn’t required, Unsplash photographers appreciate a credit as it provides exposure to their work and encourages them to continue sharing. A credit can be as simple as adding their name with a link to their profile or photo:

Graphic Burger –Graphic Burger is a buffet of premium quality design resources offered for free to the community. Here you’ll find exclusive PSD files “cooked” in-house along with featured, top-notch freebies from creatives around the world.”

PlusPng – On this site you can see transparent PNG images, and pictures for web design and design in best high resolution and quality archive.

Here you will find thousands of different PNG in thousands of categories. Enjoy… See a best and big PNG Transparent images archive;

PNG tree– (From the website)”, Pngtree have millions of graphics resources for everyone to download. To build a largest PNG free resource platform in the world, service for all the professional designer and people who have the design skills. Help users save time and process projects efficiently is our duty.”

The Noun Project – The Noun Project is a website that aggregates and catalogs symbols that are created and uploaded by graphic designers around the world. Based in Los Angeles, the project functions both as a resource for people in search of typographic symbols and a design history of the genre.

Clipart

If it is clipart you are after you cannot go past a visit to Teachers Pay Teachers, there is an incredibly wide range of free clipart packs to get you started. This link alone will take you to thousands of free resources. It is essential that you read each clip artists terms of use and the same with Font creators, and each time you use one of their resources you need to acknowledge them in the resources you are creating.

Choosing Fonts

As well as Teachers Pay Teachers, there are several sites that you can go to to download fonts but be cautious and many of them require that you purchase a commercial license if you are going to use them in your products. This link will take you to the selection of free fonts on TPT however, be mindful that many of them state ‘for personal use only’

DaFont – simply register to gain access, and you will find a huge range of fonts to choose from. You can select by type, or theme e.g. fancy, techno, gothic, basic, script etc.

1001 Fonts – again register and donate to your favourite font creator to use the font in your resources. Like dafont, there is the option to type in the text that you wish to display, and it will show you all the variations in different fonts which is a very handy tool to be able to use.

1001 Free Fonts – Looking for quality fonts for commercial use? We highly recommend the Ultimate Font Download. Download 10,000 fonts with one click for just $19.95. The Ultimate Font Download is the largest and best-selling font collection online. The fonts are licensed for personal and commercial use. Download 10,000 fonts today. Instant and unlimited access to 10,000 fonts, which is a bargain…

Font Squirrel – Free fonts have met their match. Find quality freeware that is licensed for commercial work. They have done the hard work, hand-selecting these typefaces and presenting them in an easy-to-use format.

So, you can see that you are spoilt for choice with very little outlay, just remember to

• Read and observe the terms of use
• Buy the commercial licence for the font you are using
• Acknowledge the font designer or clip artist in your product
• Flatten your images (we will talk about this in another blog)
• As a marketplace seller, you have the responsibility to protect other people’s work, and not breach copyright. (Copyright offender can be given take down notices)

We hope that you have found the tips and links in this blog useful. Stay tuned as soon we will be looking at Copyright, TOU (terms of use) cover design and setting up templates in PowerPoint.

These two websites are a wonderful design tool for anyone who blogs, creates resources or need to create Social Media posts. Crello and Canva both require you to set up an account and many of the free features of both, are enough for most Teacherpreneurs. The beauty of both, is that your work is saved, so that you can always go back and retrieve or re purpose your images. CANVA also has an app so that you can continue working on your phone or tablet, all of your designs will be readily accessible.

Lets do a comparison of the two:

CANVA CRELLO Video tutorials available https://designschool.canva.com/getting- started-with-canva-video-tutorials/ Video tutorials available https://support.crello.com/hc/en- us/categories/115000395013-How-to-Guide- Free version available with limited usage. You can buy any of the elements individually if you choose. Free version available with limited usage. You can buy any of the elements individually if you choose. Your finished product will be watermarked with “Made with Crello” on it Designs you create are autosaved, and are available on the app that you can download on IOS and Android Designs you create are autosaved, no app available.

CANVA CRELLO Wide range of templates available Wide range of templates available https://crello.com/templates/keyword-app/ No animated images available Animated images available for download as MP4 files Resizing can only be done with paid version Resizing can be done easily by simply clicking on the image size that you want. It will open in a new tab. No Video option – not even in the pro-version

Video option available (Only in the pro-version)

No option to upload fonts in the free version You can upload your own fonts in the free version You can only create files in the paid version You can upload your own images into files in the free version

Socially Sorted

This blog has some fantastic alternatives to CANVA and CRELLO for you to explore. Whatever you choose, these online websites are a wonderful alternative to photoshop if you don’t have time to learn how to use it. This article was written by Socially Sorted