Simple Tools to Create Professional Graphics

We have often heard the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Creating presentations or educational resources can greatly benefit from finding the right image or graphic to help illustrate a point or help a learner remember a concept. Yet for those of us who do not have the skills to create the images/graphics to meet our teaching needs, it is difficult to take advantage of the educational benefits that images can provide. Fortunately, there are many tools that are available to help the graphically-challenged. For example, consider the three tools below that require no technical or design expertise and are free to use:

• Autodraw is a very cool, easy-to-use tool created by Google Creative Lab that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to turn your sketches into professional illustrations by guessing at what you are trying to draw. Illustrations can be saved and downloaded for use in creating digital content. This app was developed by the CDC to summarize their 2016 opioid guideline and includes instruction on how to perform motivational interviewing with pain patients.
• Beam is a simple tool that helps you quickly create bar charts, pie charts and line charts for an attractive visualization of your data. Charts can be saved and downloaded for integration into reports and presentations.
• Paper is a sketching app for an iPad/iPhone that helps turn free-hand drawings into digital art with features like auto-correction to snap rough drawings into straight lines and shapes. Sketches can be saved as images and/or exported into Powerpoint and Keynote.