Often when we talk about our work, we talk in terms of ‘what’ we did. The Showing My Work series of posts aim to also capture the ‘how’ something was done.

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #50 – Flat Office Design The brief: This week your challenge is to design an office or desktop theme based on your own workplace environment. Design as many objects as you like. For variety, try adding both top and front views of your workspace. Extra credit: Share a photo of your office workspace so we can compare it with your flat design template.

According to Wikipedia, “Flat design refers to a style of interface design which removes any stylistic choices that give the illusion of three-dimensions (such as drop shadows, gradients, or textures) and is focused on a minimalist use of simple elements, typography and flat colours”. Flat design is a style that seems popular nowadays and I’m noticing it more and more, for example, the apps on my phone are now flat. So the aim of this challenge was to create an office design using this style.

One of the first things I did was to take a photo of my desk; after all, I wanted that extra credit! Then I started thinking about how I could recreate the elements that are there (and add some more) using shapes. I thought about each item individually and what shape I would need to create it in both the front and top views and for some things it was a matter of trail and error before I got it right. To give the flat appearance, I used no outline on the shapes I inserted. As an example, here are of the shapes I used for the coffee cup that have been split apart:

Each time I created something for the front view, I followed it by creating the same item in the top view but changing the perspective. So, the cup is a rectangle and a half circle in the front view but becomes a rectangle and two circles in the top view. I also made sure that I kept the sizes the same in the top and front views – the width of the rectangle in the front view is the same as the diameter of the circle in the top view:

The whole demo is created on one slide in Storyline 1 but it could also be created in PowerPoint too as it has the same shapes functionality. I made use of layers in SL and built the top and front views on separate layers and then I added two buttons on the base layer. I took away the player altogether to give the whole demo a flat look and I thought this was fine but I wanted to make the demo a bit more interesting. I needed something that would add to the demo in some way but still fit in with the brief. What I came up with was a short introduction to the challenge and given that the office furniture came from IKEA, I worked that in too which ties in nicely with the flat design theme. I used entrance (fly in from the right) and exit (fly out to the left) animations to move the text in and out of screen and staggered the text boxes along the timeline to make it flow from one text box to the next:

Here’s the demo, you can click on the image to view it:

Let me know what you think and you can see all of my ELH Challenge entries on My Portfolio page.