Developing a consistent look and feel across courses

Hey Andrew!

This is a great topic.

Something that immediately came to mind for me when I read this was that you might benefit from the Export and Import Player feature for this project.

This means that once you've designed your course player to look and function exactly how you want (logo, color scheme, font, menu setup, etc.) you can export the Player as an .XML file and then import it in another version of the software to apply that exact design to another course.  

Here's a link to a handy tutorial on how to do this: Sharing player templates and color schemes in Storyline. 

Hope this helps! =)

Hi Andrew! Great post on developing a consistent feel throughout your project development.  

I will direct you to a set of books by Jim Krause.  I recently bought 4 of his books and am thoroughly impressed by all of them.  The first one I would snag though would be his book called Design Basics Index. It's a great resource to have when contemplating the issue of consistent feel and themes when designing.  

Hi Andrew,

Recently, I was involved in a project where 10-15 people developed 100+ lessons on innovations in the workplace. I honestly think that the fact that it wasn't created by one person made the lessons differentiated and less boring (imagine going through 100 lessons which are very similar). Each of the developers contributed their own approach to animations and graphics, while still sticking to the common player template, color scheme and the overall look and feel (title, font, we shared some tabs interactions and quiz templates, etc.). Unless the courses really need to be very consistent, I woudn't worry too much about the issue. 

Good luck!

Thanks Marta -- I definitely agree. I was having a hard time coming up with the common elements you mention above -- player template, color scheme, fonts, etc. However, I think I have something that works. 

Here were two resources that really helped me:  

1. Adobe Color CC helped me come up with a color scheme: https://color.adobe.com/create/image/
   
   
2. The Articulate e-book on visual design helped me with a lot of the other decisions, like title fonts and the like. https://community.articulate.com/e-books

I chose a midnight blue and orange color scheme. I work at a visual company so they're very interested in what the course looks like and have it matching the brand aesthetic, so it took some iterations but happy with what I have now. 

-Andrew

i actually just left this same reply on another thread.

I am working on a series of lessons now. I started out by creating slide templates for most aspects.

• Title page template
• Lesson objective template
• Objective introduction slide template
• 4-5 slides templates for scenario based questions
• 2-3 slides for conversations
• 2-3 styles of menu slides
• thank you slide
• picked 3-4 characters to represent different view points that will be used to keep the character and the topic/viewpoint they are discussing consistent

etc... These keep the overall look and feel consistent but I can change up slides as the material requires so that it's not the same for each one.

Hope this helps