Trainers Talk Tech

One of my clients has had a cool vision for her eLearning projects and it involves avatars - not the blue smurfy giants, but the digital characters/cartoons that help lead your learners through the training.

I've done quite a bit of it in the past, but it always adds to the cost because I hire an illustrator/cartoonist to develop my characters. Whenever I hire out, it costs me and the clients more money. As budgets dried up last year, it was a pretty quiet year for avatars.

However, I've developed some eLearning for this client in the past, they were used to my pricing structure, and I didn't want to look like I was price spiking. So, I figured that I would see if there were some avatars available online that weren't too cheesy, and that I could pick up cheaply so as to not pass the cost onto the client.

After a long and painful search, I am happy to have found this site: Cartoon Solutions. It's not a site specifically for eLearning, but for Flash cartoons. It contains dozens of characters that you can download for a steal ($22.00 or so, $50 for the character plus 18 animations). Men, women, kids, animals, plus backgrounds and props, all in the same toony "style". And, when you buy, you get the .fla file with all the embedded mouth and hand positions so you can drop them right into your project.

As you know, 90% of my stuff is build in Flash so this was a perfect fit. While designed for Flash cartoons, I found them to be a perfect fit for these new eLearning projects.

The best part: My client LOVED the rapid prototype. If you know Flash and want to add a toony look to your eLearning, check out Cartoon Solutions!