The summer heat has hit us here in Ohio this week. This is the time of year I sing the praises of the inventor of air conditioning. I know summer is supposed to be all porch swings, lemonade, and fireflies, but at a certain point “sunny and warm” turns into “why does the air feel like soup?” So I’ll be spending the next few days doing what any sensible Midwesterner does: moving quickly between air-conditioned spaces and pretending yard work is a fall activity.

Thanks for reading!

Supported by iSpring

L&D teams often have the results. The hard part is turning them into a story leaders can act on. This guided slide deck helps you connect training outcomes to business priorities, show impact, flag risks, and recommend what to scale, fix, or stop.

​Get the deck to show your impact to your leadership →​

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Typography, Color, Spacing—They're Not Design. They're Instructions.

When you skim a well-designed slide, your eye lands on the key point. When you skim a bad one, you're lost. That's not preference. That's work.

Visual hierarchy isn't about being pretty. It's about freeing mental effort. Force learners to hunt for the main concept, and you've burned working memory on decoding layout instead of learning.

Here's the research. Easy-to-parse typography and spacing trigger fluent processing—the subjective ease of handling information. Reber, Schwarz, and Winkielman (2004) showed it predicts comprehension. Easier to parse = more understanding.

Now the sharp part: split attention kills learning. A label separated from its diagram? Cognitive load spikes. Chandler and Sweller (1992) documented it. Integrated sources (grouped, aligned, shared visual language) = faster processing. Scattered sources = working memory burnout before learning even starts.

The best instructors teach effortlessly because they remove friction from how information arrives. They design for cognition, not density.

Here's why:

If split attention crushes learning, we in L&D should be obsessed with visual hierarchy. Instead, most treat it as decoration.

Visual hierarchy got categorized as design. Design got categorized as aesthetics. It sits in a gap: UX owns it as craft, learning science ignores it, L&D pretends it doesn't matter. So new designers inherit scattered practices without learning that every pixel placement reduces or increases cognitive load.

Also supported by Neovation

Marketers spend their whole careers learning to earn attention. Most of us in L&D skip past that and head straight to designing. Then we wonder why nobody shows up. I'm doing a session with Neovation on how to fix it.

June 24, 1 pm ET / 12 pm CT / 10 am PT.

​Save your seat ​→​

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Worth your attention
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Easy-to-process content feels better, more credible, and more valuable.

Reber, Schwarz, and Winkielman’s big idea is that beauty often begins as ease: when something is simple for the brain to process—clear, familiar, well-organized, symmetrical, or easy to recognize—it feels better, more pleasing, and even more credible. In other words, fluent design doesn’t just look nicer; it changes how people judge value, truth, and quality before they’ve fully thought it through.

​Read the original paper →​

The Hidden Cost of Scattered Information

Chandler and Sweller’s split-attention research shows that learners struggle when related information is scattered across a page or screen. When people have to bounce between a diagram, labels, text, instructions, or examples, they waste working memory stitching the pieces together instead of learning the actual content. The fix is simple: put related information together. Good instructional design does not make learners hunt.

​Learn more about split attention →​

Good Multimedia Design Removes Friction

Mayer and Moreno’s research shows that multimedia learning works best when it protects people’s limited working memory. Learners understand more when we cut the clutter, sync words with visuals, place related information together, break complex ideas into chunks, explain key terms upfront, and avoid making people read and listen to the same words at the same time. The lesson is simple: good multimedia design is not about adding more media. It is about removing mental friction so learners can focus on the thing they’re actually supposed to learn.

​Explore smarter multimedia design →​

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The Bottom Line

You've been taught to separate design from instruction. Stop. They're the same thing now. Every choice about where things go, what stands out, and what recedes is a teaching decision. You're not designing slides. You're giving your learners instructions on where to look and what matters. Every time you choose to scatter information instead of grouping it, or use the same visual weight for everything, you're teaching them that nothing is worth paying attention to. Which is the opposite of what you want.

One thing to do this week: Pull your three most-used course templates. For each one, ask: Can a learner tell what's primary, what's supporting detail, and what's optionaljust by looking? Before they read a word? If the answer is no, you've found your first split-attention problem to fix.

🎵 Today I'm listening to Depeche Mode​

📍Where I'll be next

• ​Why Great Training Gets Ignored & How to Fix It, June 24 (Online)
• ​ATD Core4, Sept 29-Oct 1(Indianapolis, IN)

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