Better Note Boxes in Rise

If you have been using Articulate Rise to create your courses, you may have used the Note block. It's great for calling out important or nice-to-know things that may get lost when it's part of the main text.

You may have also thought to yourself, "Oh how I wish these Note boxes can be customized". Maybe change the tiny icon to something else. Or change the background color so you can have different types of Notes. Maybe a light red for a warning note, or light yellow for a regular note. 

It's one of those features that users have been clamoring for since the early years of Rise but may have been considered as low priority by Articulate. 

So what are we to do? Get creative! Using a single cell table is the most straightforward solution to create different types of Note boxes but it comes with its own limitations.

☹  You cannot remove the border 
☹  You cannot change the color of the border, it's either grey or red (highlighted cell style)
☹  You cannot add an image inside a table
☹  You cannot change the margins

With those in mind. Let's begin designing our own Note boxes.

This first one the most simple. It is a single-cell table with a light blue background (#E3EDF2). The header font is increased to size 18. If you have multiple types of note boxes, you can use different colors and change the title.

Taking it up a notch, let's add an emoji beside the header. 

These icons are considered as text and can be rendered by modern browsers. A lot of knowledgebase platforms use them as well. I go to copypastecharacter.com to look for emojis to use. 

The icon font size is increased to 24 and I changed the color of my header text. The background is also different per note box type. You can also make it fancier by selecting the Dashbored border table style.

Lastly, if you're used to having the icon to the left, you can use a two-cell table.

The limitation here is that the background color should be the same as the border color (#DDDDDD) or else you'll see the border line in-between cells. You can make the icon here bigger as well. I used font size 28.

There are other ways to use tables as a note box but these are the ones that look clean and easy on the eyes. Don't forget to save them as a template block so that you and your team can reuse them easily.

Cheers!