Hands-on design principles for medical teaching videos

Once you've learned the basic principles of design you need to consider when creating a medical teaching video, it'll be time to put them into action!

In this video, we will continue to show you how to apply the design principles (proximity, alignment, repetition, and contrast) to an actual scene taken from one of our courses.

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In this Medmastery lesson, I'll show you how to apply the design principles you've learned previously to an actual scene taken from one of our courses. So here we go. We start out with just the script and apply a new knowledge to create and arrange the visuals and keywords for the scene. Let's get started. This is the script for our scene.

To stratify infection risk patients may be categorized in a traffic light system, confirmed COVID category one, suspected COVID category two, low risk or confirmed negative COVID category three. The first thing to do is to resist the temptation of putting all that text into the scene. Because that's not only lazy, but also boring.

Your learners are hearing the script so there really is no need for them to be reading it too. So let's cut down on some text and go visual instead. The scene is about categorizing patients into three types, we can portray them with cartoon patients. One feverish coughing patient to represent the confirmed COVID infection.

A patient who presents with a cough and is therefore suspected to carry COVID, and an asymptomatic patient who is low risk. With those visuals in place, we can get rid of the whole first sentence on screen. It's still a lot of text. Remember, you should display as few words as possible. That's why we'll shorten the text some more and keep only the essentials.

We'll also get rid of the bullet points to keep an open mind about distributing the text on screen. Now these are basic design elements we'll have on display during the scene. Next up, we'll apply the principles of proximity, alignment, repetition and contrast to organize them and improve clarity.

With the principle of proximity in mind, we'll group the cartoons with the appropriate keywords. This creates three visual units which allow the audience to identify the patients with their categories. Simultaneously, we'll apply the principle of alignment, and introduce an invisible grid to arrange the visual units.

The alignment will allow us to move text within one visual unit further apart. Even though the text is no longer grouped this closely together, it's still connected via the alignment, thus clearly related. Now that the category numbers stand on their own, the parenthesis are no longer necessary. So we can get rid of one more unnecessary element.

Applying the principle of repetition, we'll make sure that all of the items are displayed consistently. In this case, we need to match the cartoons in size to make the scene look neat. The text styles are already consistent, even too consistent. The consistent style would suggest that all of them carry the same type of information, but they don't.

The three keywords on top tell us how the categories are called, and the ones on the bottom are an explanation of what the categories mean. So really, these are two types of information. Let's call them A and B. We can distinguish the two types of information to enhance clarity by introducing a visual hierarchy between A and B.

This is done by adding contrast. We change the style of our type A information and underlay it with colored ovals. This makes it clearly different from type B. Note that we're not only contrasting type A and B, but we're also adding contrast between our three visual groups, by choosing three different colors red, yellow, and green, the traffic light system.

Finally, we can add some more visual interest by adding a stamp like style for type B information, and fully committing to the traffic light colors. Note that the basic design principles go hand in hand. We're contrasting the three categories with three different colors. At the same time, we keep them consistent and tied together by using similarly shaped design elements and the consistent alignment.

All that is left to do now is to animate the visual elements to be in sync with the script. This will reduce the amount of visual information the learners need to process at a time. Let's take a look at the results. To stratify infection risk patients may be categorized in a traffic light system. Confirmed COVID category one, suspected COVID category two, low risk or confirmed negative COVID category three.