What I designed today: A horizontal funnel to illustrate learner journey retention for Google Cloud

Disclaimer: I’ve been so busy working that most of the “What I designed today” posts are going to be a retrospective! I designed this horizontal funnel a few weeks ago. The funnel was used in executive presentations using Google Slides for Google Cloud Partner Learning & Certification. The intent was to illustrate Google Cloud learner journey progress through a 5-stage funnel. I had a difficult time finding a vector or raster graphic for a horizontal funnel, so I drew one in Adobe Illustrator! I actually drew two versions: a horizontal funnel WITH a gray path and one without. Here’s the original .ai file for Adobe Illustrator for you to copy and tweak or a transparent PNG. Not-so-incidentally, this fits standard Google or PowerPoint Slides perfectly.

SEE BELOW the FUNNEL IMAGE for QUICK DESIGN TUTORIAL on how to use PNG files and keep image sizes low in large presentations and documents.

Design tip: place the entire PNG in your file and crop the image to the part you want to use. If you’re working in PowerPoint, you can compress images to what is shown to keep your file size down. Here’s a handy, quick 1-minute video tutorial on how to save space by compressing images in PowerPoint — makes for easy file sharing and space saving files. It was an old tech tip I shared with colleagues in my last role but still applies for those of you who want to keep file sizes down for sharing without using cloud hyperlinks.

What I Designed Today: Custom Penzey’s Spice Jar Labels

My trip to Omaha over Spring Break was very fun — and very exhausting.  Now I’m back home in Bartlesville and there’s a zillion things I should be doing right now OTHER than making custom spice jar labels.  But I went to Penzey’s.  And I bought these cute jars with yummy spices (e.g., celery salt that actually smells like celery and salt).  It makes complete sense, right??  Right!  It just makes me feel better.  I’m attaching links to the file as a pdf and png, shown below, but if you’d like the original Illustrator CS5 file, just shoot me an email (the fonts used are Alex Brush and Zebrawood).  The PDF could also be edited in Adobe Acrobat. I hope it makes you “feel better” too.  Priorities, people.

PDF DOWNLOAD:  penzeysspicelabels

This pdf file is set up for HP Restickables (a sticker I highly recommend that is more like a post-it note that you can remove and reposition many times) – it’s from a really old stash and I don’t think anyone sells them anymore, but any basic sticker stock would do!  I manually cut out the labels.  Yes, I’m insane.  Who has time to do such a thing?  Certainly not me.  But I did cut them out, one by one, and it totally relaxed me.  The outline isn’t perfect but I’m seriously happy with them anyway.

spicejarfreetemplateDSC_0351penzeysspicelabels