New in Storyline 360: Emphasis Animations (Beta)

Jan 23, 2024

Annie Kim
By Annie Kim

Emphasis animations—the effects you know and love from PowerPoint—are now available in the beta version of Storyline 360! These eye-catching effects like pulsing, shaking, and teetering give you even more ways to grab and direct your learners' attention. And if you're designing animated scenes or interactions, you'll now have even more options for creating the exact experience you're looking for. The sky's the limit with this feature!

Ready to take your content to the next level? Simply select your object, go to the Animations tab, and click the Add Emphasis Animation drop-down arrow to choose an animation from the gallery. It's that easy!

And here's a time-saving benefit: Thanks to this feature, you can now preview local JavaScript triggers, such as ones that retrieve or set the value of a Storyline 360 variable, to ensure they work as expected.

Excited to check this feature out? Articulate 360 subscribers can access these animations right away. If you don't have Articulate 360, just start a free 30-day trial. For more details about emphasis animations, check out this article: Storyline 360: Emphasis Animations.

This feature is currently in beta—meaning it's still a work in progress. We'll continue to refine it, using your feedback as guidance. Comment below to share your experience using emphasis animations. We'd love to hear from you!

Pinned Reply
Lauren Connelly
2 months ago02/20/24 at 2:52 pm (UTC)

Hello all!

In Storyline 360 (Build 3.85.31840.0), we fixed a bug that many of you were running into:

  • Fixed: Emphasis-animation triggers could become incomplete after reopening a project file.

From here, all you need to do is update Storyline 360 in your Articulate 360 desktop app!

If you run into any issues, please don't hesitate to reach out to our Support team in a support case. 

68 Replies
Laura MacNeil
3 months ago01/23/24 at 7:01 pm (UTC)

Very neat, I love this! It gives the opportunity to be a little playful with your animations. Previously I have tried to create my own teetering effect by making custom motion paths which is not as smooth as the new Teeter effect.

However, with the Growth and Shrink effect, I notice the image does not revert back to it's original size. When the growth effect is added, the image will get bigger and stay large, and vice versa with the Shrink. Fiddling with the effect options do not seem to help.
(This may have designed it this way intentionally though...)

The images with the other effects (teeter, shake, pulse) return to their initial state/size/placement.

I tried creating a second state to get the image to Change to state 2 after emphasis animation completes, but it doesn't seem to want to.

I will figure out a workaround. Probably hiding the image and having a second identical image appear when the engagement is complete, or combine with entrance/ exit animations.

Perhaps an option to return the image to its original state upon the emphasis animation completion might be nice, but this is great! I will certainly be using this feature right away :)

Kirk Hine
3 months ago01/25/24 at 4:01 pm (UTC)

Yes...create a trigger that plays the animation on "when animation completes"

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Tom Kuhlmann
3 months ago01/25/24 at 5:53 pm (UTC)

To get the new animations, you need to update Storyline. Go into the Articulate tray app on your task bar and in the drop down arrow for Storyline you should see the option to update Storyline to the newest version.

As far as looping, Kirk is correct:

  • Create an initial trigger for the emphasis animation
  • Create a second trigger to play emphasis animation when emphasis animation completes. This works for those animations that have the same start/stop point. With the grow and shrink you have to add a third trigger since they don't have the same start/stop.
  • Here's a quick tutorial that walks through the basics.
Annie Kim
3 months ago01/25/24 at 6:16 pm (UTC)

Hi Laura, for the grow and shrink effect, you can accomplish that by choosing "Original Size" under "Effect Options". For example:

- Grow rectangle (effect option: large [which is the default]) when user clicks 

- Shrink rectangle (effect option: original size [need to select]) when grow animation completes or when timeline ends, etc 

Hope that helps!

Ghislaine Laurin
3 months ago01/29/24 at 1:32 pm (UTC)

I am enjoying this new feature! It seems to work with a variety of triggers. I agree that an option to return the image to its original state upon the emphasis animation completion would be nice.

There is one major issue, however : I created and saved a project with quite a few emphasis animations. When I reopened the project a day later, all of the emphasis animations had disappeared from my objects and my triggers showed "unassigned". Very disappointed this morning :-(
I am unable to send a support case because Articulate Support is down for maintenance until Jan. 29th 2024.

Tetiana Zhmurko
3 months ago01/29/24 at 10:04 pm (UTC)

I have the same issue as described above. All of my emphasis animations automatically deleted after opening previously saved project. I tried repeating my steps a few times to reproduce the bug, but with no luck. I re-added animations, but they continue to disappear after a while. I haven't been able to determine the specific conditions yet, it just happens randomly when I open a project.

I'm using 32 bit version only, never installed x64.

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