Forum Discussion
New in Rise 360: Enhanced Block Settings and Block Contrast Controls
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.
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.
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.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.
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.
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 .
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 appearedThank you.
Hi, how do we remove the border from video embeds? I can't find the option with the new layout.
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 possibilitiesYou 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.
Thanks Marcos, much appreciated.
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.
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:
- Image captions, when the image block has a dark background (see attached example 1)
- Text of draggable items in the sorting activities, when the block has a dark background (see attached example 2)
This may not seem as such a big deal, but it means that we will need to review absolutely every lesson of the 120-or-so lessons of the courses we have created over the last few months and which are still in development. Also, any edits to be made to existing (published) courses will imply going through the entire course again to make sure text styles have not been affected by this recent Rise update. Basically, we're talking about many many hours of unforeseen review time.This is simply not acceptable and it's essential that ALL original styles are preserved, without having to go back and manually reset them to how they appeared before...We're expecting a prompt solution to this bug from the Rise team!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)
- Image captions, when the (centered) image block has a dark background
- Text of draggable items in the sorting activities, when the block has a dark background
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.
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.
