Forum Discussion
New in Rise 360: More Course Customization with Themes
I’m so excited to share our latest release with you. Today, we shipped a huge update to Rise 360 that gives you more creative ways to customize the look and feel of your projects. Rise 360 now includes a variety of scroll-stopping themes—all created by award-winning designers—with more themes coming soon. Apply themes in just a few clicks, or, for that extra-personalized touch, we’ve added the option to customize many theme elements.
The possibilities are endless, so let’s take a closer look at all the latest Rise 360 goodness.
New Themes
Rise 360 has always been a great option for quickly creating beautiful, responsive courses. And with the addition of Rise 360 themes, you’ve got brand-new ways to add your own unique spin to projects.
Here’s a quick rundown of each theme:
- Rise—our original theme—is modern and clean-lined. It’s a tried-and-true design choice that never goes out of style.
- Apex makes a bold, contemporary statement with striking, angular flourishes.
- Horizon is a great choice when your project needs a design that’s elegant, sharp, and stylish.
You can see all three styles in the image below.
And these stunning new themes are just the beginning. We’ve got even more theme designs in development.
New Theme Customization
Before, Rise 360 theme customization options were found under the Settings menu. Now, we’ve pulled theme settings into a new Theme menu, as you can see below.
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BEFORE
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AFTER
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This change streamlines course creation by nesting all of the theme customization options in one spot. Under the new Theme menu, you’ll click to choose your desired theme and then click Save to apply it to your project. It’s as easy as that.
These striking themes were designed to be used as is to simplify and speed the course creation process. But for that extra-personalized look and feel, we’ve added more options to customize elements like cover page layout, navigation type, lesson headers, accent colors, font pairings, button styles, and more. With so many flexible options, you can style your theme to better meet your learners’ needs and easily create more cohesive, branded learning experiences.
To give you an idea of how these new themes can be customized, explore the following examples. We applied each theme to the same course content—and we customized each version with unique colors, navigation, and lesson header styles.
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What’s your favorite combination? Leave me a comment below.
Summing It Up
The new Rise 360 themes feature opens up a whole new world of possibilities. And we’re just getting started. There are more stylish theme designs in the works and we’re making progress on giving you the ability to create your own custom themes as well. We’re excited to continue delivering features that empower you to create eye-catching, unique learning experiences in record time.
Want to try out Rise 360 themes for yourself? Head over to your Rise 360 dashboard and start with a new course, a course template, or any existing Rise 360 project. Don’t have Rise 360? Start your free 30-day trial of Articulate 360 now.
Be sure to keep an eye on our Articulate 360 feature road map and the What’s New page to stay up-to-date on what we’re working on.
As others have stated above, limiting the Theme setting to the course owner is very restrictive. We like may others have multiple people working on our course library and will be reviewing themes for all our course using the new settings. Please make a change to have all course managers and collaborators to be able to make changes to theme settings. This restriction makes absolutely no sense at all. Thanks
Themes takes up so much real estate space on the landing page. Is there a way to change the size to the way it was in the previous version?
Hi there, Lisa! Thanks so much for checking out the Themes feature, and I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. Can you share a screenshot of the landing page that is taking up too much space?
If you use the Standard Rise theme, you course cover page should appear the same as it did before. You can find this option by clicking Theme > Change theme.
Let me know if that's not what you had in mind!
I like this update, but am a little disappointed in the customization options.
1. I was so excited for the Lesson Headers with the image option, but then was really disappointed when the image applied is the same for all lessons. For now, I will continue to use "Text on image block", as I can customize it per lesson.
2. Can't mix and match theme options. I like the Rise sidebar the most of the 3 themes and I like the Apex buttons better for the navigation. I can't have both and wish I had more choice when customizing.
I hope you will consider adding these options. Thanks!
Hey Austin! It sounds like you still need a feature that will allow you to use a different header image on each lesson. Using a "Text on image block" is a smart alternative in the meantime!
For your second question about using the Apex theme + a sidebar, you should be able to combine those two options! Here's a sample course where I applied the Apex theme with a sidebar.
If that's not what you had envisioned, please share a screenshot or two of the settings you want to combine. Thanks!
- Alyssa Gomez
Hi Alyssa. For the second question, I was referring to mixing styles from separate themes. I am aware you can have different sidebar options for all themes, however, the sidebar looks visually different between each theme, same for all visual elements. See attached image.
While the Rise and Apex sidebars are similar, the Rise one is closer together and in my opinion, more visually pleasing. I also feel the same way about the Apex - Navigation Full-Width buttons, however, I can't have both because the visual looks I want are in separate themes.
What I would like to be able to do is use visual options from each theme at the same time.
I hope that clears things up.
Hello! I wanted to provide feedback regarding accessibility options with theming. I was a little surprised to see that some of the default color options are not considered accessible to all. For example, the orange will never pass an accessibility test. In fact, several of them don't. I realize you can customize with your own colors but I think maybe the default offerings should be revisited to ensure the color combinations are equally accessible to all learners. Thanks!
Hi there, Stephanie! Thanks so much for bringing this up. Right now, the Blueberry (navy) and Jelly (purple) default theme colors pass the contrast requirements for WCAG AA.
To design a course with accessibility in mind, be sure to choose a custom color that allows for a contrast ratio of 4.5:1 or higher for on-screen text so learners with low vision can read it. Here’s a helpful contrast checker to determine your contrast ratio.
A welcome start to change, as many are getting death by Rise now as the look and feel is the same. Needs more though. The cover pages are simply columns in HTML5 being moved around. We need more than that. The option (I have asked for this several times) to bypass the Cover page completely and go straight in to a lesson especially if it is short and only one lesson. The need to click on Start module is not required then. This is based on a lot of feedback in the past few years. We have now taken out licenses with GOMO and Elucidat as alternatives to mix it up a bit and offer something different. Vertical Scrolling and parallax content is being requested so we have to work with that also. Still no option to customize and brand icons on the cover page. As we have to follow our company brand guidelines and use specific icons, again, we have to move away from Rise just based on this simple requirement.
I applaud the strong development effort.
My wish - I want to set a default font size and color. I don't want it to be 17. Why IS it 17? :)
I have just been asked to review a course created 6 months ago and to make a few minor edits but now the Video player etc is different to the original and so has shifted the videos on the different slide. I put an invisible rectangle over the player to stop users from scrubbing (something is still missing from Storyline 360 but is in Rise) but these have now been shifted. I have to go through each slide with videos to adjust them again. Now that the video player is different I have to redo 20 modules in a set to keep them with the same look and feel.
hahaha c'mon you can't claim this is giving users customisation!
We are still paying a premium price for a program that has very little editability and customisation.This is very sweet and all, but we STILL can't change the color of text bullets. Seems like you might want to focus your engineering efforts on basic text formatting that has been requested for over FIVE years.
Hi there! I was curious if there is a way to save a custom theme instead of having to recreate it every time I create a new course. We use consistent colors and fonts to fit with our branding, and it would be nice not to have to go through all of the theme setting for every course we create. So far, I haven't discovered a way to do that. Is it possible? Thanks!
Hi,
I created a Rise course that we use as a template for all our new courses.
The entire THEME consisting of the course cover image, icon, custom color, fonts, navigation, labels have all been set up. We also set up the Publish settings.
When we start a new project, I copy the template course and rename it, and assign team members to it.
Note that you need to first create a Lesson before you can edit the THEME.
