New in Rise 360: Enhanced Block Settings and Block Contrast Controls
Sep 19, 2023
Get ready to do even more with the block settings menu—that little menu that appears when you hover over a block. You can still move, duplicate, or delete your block and edit block content, but now you can also adjust the design and apply new contrast settings!
Move, Duplicate, Delete, and Design!
Eagle-eyed Rise 360 users will notice a new design icon that looks like a painter's palette on the right-hand side toolbar. Click that to open the all-new format and background tabs.
Similar to the previous format tab, the new format tab has options such as padding and color selection for block items, such as button colors. But now, instead of having to guess how many pixels you need between blocks, you can quickly apply small, medium, or large padding options. If you speak pixels, that's cool, too. You can still dial in exact pixel-widths by clicking the more icon.
The background tab is where you can make your content really stand out. Select an option here to fill all the white space around your block content with your color of choice. It's like course theme header background colors—but at the individual block level.
In addition to standard light and dark options, you can add your theme color (or a lighter tint of it) as well as a custom color or an image.
Constant Contrast
When you apply a custom color background, you also get access to block-level contrast options: Auto, Light, and Dark.
With Auto selected, text and graphic elements conform to an accessible 4.5:1 ratio. Even if you select a different color, text and graphic elements change from light to dark as needed to preserve contrast. And if you don't want your content elements changing automatically, you can select Light or Dark.
We've got contrast on the brain when it comes to image backgrounds as well. When you select an image background, you can now adjust the overlay just like you can on a course cover photo). This option makes your background image lighter or darker by adjusting its opacity by percentage. Your content will really pop!
If you’re an Articulate 360 subscriber, you can access this new feature immediately in Rise 360. And if you don’t have Articulate 360 but want to try out this feature, you can start a free 30-day trial. For more detailed information about this feature, check out our user guide: Rise 360: Enhanced Block Settings.
We're excited to bring you even more options for customizing your content. Let us know if this hits the mark—or if we can do even more to make your content shine! Share your experience in the comments below. We love to hear your feedback.
54 Replies
These new controls block my view of my text when I first start typing, how can I change that?
This update really threw me. I was in the middle of editing a course and all of a sudden everything changed. I would really like the long-awaited project-wide padding setting soon please. All of our projects use a 10 px spacing for nearly all blocks. It would be a lot less work if I could apply that project-wide and then only adjust the few that need wider (like continue buttons, some interactions, etc).
Help! While this is a great feature, it seems to have modified (overridden) existing custom block content/font colours. Yikes! We have customized many courses in Rise, and ensured they are all compliant (contrast and other elements). This new feature requires us to review ALL past courses in detail and adjust accordingly. This will cause considerable additional efforts and $$$. So far, this is what my colleague and I have identified as issues:
Text colour changed from white to black, due to the recent updates (Enhanced block settings and lock contrast controls)
There may be other issues that we have yet to discover. Not big deals on their own, but when you consider reviewing over 100 lessons yet approved... or making edits to previous courses and modules created in Rise. This is kind of a big deal.
We thought others would start to notice. Hopefully Articulate team can help us all out.
Hello Rise folks,
Thanks for the continuing updates, which make Rise an even better and powerful authoring tool.
HOWEVER, this recent update is really causing us a headache, since in several cases, existing styles are not respected. More specifically, here are two use cases where text colour changed from white to black, due to this recent update:
I agree! I noticed a couple of weird things with colours and block padding after the update but dismissed it as perhaps my memory was failing me. Glad to know this wasn't just me. Changing the settings we already had for either padding or colours, backgrounds, etc. will be a HUGE issue for me. I work with multiple clients and have many courses with many lessons for each. Having to comb through each and every course for inconsistencies or things that are broken because of this will be a significant (read: expensive) cost.
Articulate - is someone reviewing this impact and is there a way to fix our courses?
Hi Leah, I hope others will chime in too. I have created a Support ticket and perhaps you should too. We are kind of at mercy at this point. Don't want to start the review process until we know what Articulate will do.
Hi everyone, just dropping a quick note that our engineering team is currently looking into this. The team will make sure to keep everyone posted.
Thanks Marcos, much appreciated.
You can set an image background on the text-on-image block. Seems weird that there's a way to set the image, and a way to set the background image of the image. Anyway, these changes are a good first step to fixing the block consistency.
Being able to set the image background is something i probably won't use until I can set the alignment too - top, middle, bottom. Having everything just set to 'cover' without being able to specify the alignment means I can't ensure certain parts of the image remain visible. I often want fancy dividers and I use full width images, and had been hoping being able to set a background image would allow that. The current hack is to use the labelled graphic block, since it is the only full-width image block that doesn't crop the underlying image.
First of all, excited to see this development and cant wait to see how people use it - feels like a big step towards creating even richer and more engaging courses.
I'd like to echo Tim's comments - feels like the alignment of backgorunds to top, middle, bottom should be relatively easy but it would make such a difference. I quite often use the workaround Tim mentioned, using empty labelled graphic blocks to create more interesting page dividers. But it isnt perfect on all dividers and if the background images had an alignment feature it would open up a whole world of possibilities
The team was able to identify what was causing the unintentional behavior that impacted your blocks and has released a fix. If you still have the course open, you may need to refresh. Please let us know if you are still experiencing unexpected behavior.
Hi, how do we remove the border from video embeds? I can't find the option with the new layout.
Amber, I had a look at this last night.
First , on the new 'Design' button on the block, go to the background tab make sure Use White Cards is unticked. Then switch back to the Format tab, and the option to get rid of the white border has magically appeared
Thank you.
So who's brilliant idea was to move the settings option to the opposite side. It was far easier and quicker to have the setting and the edit options in one place. Also did I miss the announcement of this 'amazing' up date?!?! I thought I was going mad and I was about to log a ticket, until my colleague noticed the little paint palate in the right hand corner.
I am all for updating and making things easier to use/do but in this case, really not impressed, makes editing a longer process and the chance of moving your block up or down by mistake if you are not concentrating .
There are now way too many clicks to change the background color of a block or to specify the padding number. These were easy to pick or paste a hex code into when the settings were on the left side with edit.
Completely agree. The same goes for changing padding. We change padding on nearly every block in courses. It was always a pain (and we've waited anxiously for the project-wide setting in Themes). Now it's even more clicks!
Not to be negative - I do like the new options quite a bit. UI is incredibly important and it feels like these new settings are too many clicks for how often they need to be used.
I agree entirely. More clicks to do the same thing is never better.
It was also much easier before to pick or paste a hex code.
I also don't want to sound negative because I genuinely like getting updates and new options.
But I needed to give feedback that the UI has significantly impacted the speed of my building. It's an extra second or two, sure, but it adds up, especially when I need to change the background color of several blocks in a row - instead of clicking settings and pasting the code in, now it's like 4 clicks on the other side of the block.
Just gonna echo, more clicks, wrong side and I always use Hex codes.....if enough users are not happy, is it possible to roll back and then perhaps tweak a few of those ideas....just a thought...
I agree that the new Icon belongs on the left side as it is related to the appearance of the block contents.
Functionally, the block appearance settings (Design icon) do not belong on the right with Move block up/down, copy block and delete block.
There are now way too many clicks to change a block's background color or specify the padding number. These were easy to pick or paste a hex code when the settings were on the left side under edit. Why the opposite side of the screen?!!? Unnecessary mouse movement. Disappointing UI update.
This is a disappointing update. There are so many more improvements that should have been prioritized. Was this that high of a priority?
Being able to drag and sections/blocks instead of using those ridiculously small arrows to move them around one click at a time (being able to group sections together to move them at one time instead of separately), better organizing of the Rise course list so that the course I am working on is always at the top (can't they be pinned?), setting styles that can be repeated instead of having to adjust each and every time etc.
Agree with previous statements that this is disappointing.
There are so many other enhancements that would have a significant impact not only on user satisfaction but efficiency in creating and managing courses on this platform.
Key examples include: