New in Rise 360: More Course Customization with Themes
Jul 19, 2022
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.
133 Replies
With this update, every time I open a course, it automatically changes my course tab from a color to an image. There is no longer an option to delete the image, and I don't want to make this change.
I've attached a picture to show what is happening. All tabs were blue until I opened them with the update. What should I do?
There seems to be an error with this feature. The continue button will not appear unless you have a page long enough to scroll. The button is still there, but hidden. Only mousing over where the button would typically be would the cursor change and allow a user to click continue. Please advise.
Hi David!
We've heard similar feedback from authors who prefer to use a theme color instead of a cover image.
We’re working on disabling course images from showing on your dashboard when you have the course accent color selected for your cover image layout.
We'll let you know as soon as we make that change!
Hey, Brandon!
We'd love to take a closer look at how the new Themes feature is affecting your continue button. Would you mind sending us your course Share link?
If that works for you, please open a case here, and drop your Share link in the case description. We'll do all we can to help!
There have been a lot of requests for hiding the lesson header and skipping the course title page. Are these still considerations? It seems that you can’t do these things yet.
This is a great update, thank you! Is there any information on if/how the different themes and various options within them impact accessibility?
Also, it would be great if in the colors section you could also set the overall text color.
Totally agree with David about photograph versus colour. Hope that the fix comes soon.
Maybe I missed some comms from you folks, but I totally missed that this upgrade was happening. Personally, a heads up before the change would have been real helpful. And some tutorials explaining how the new Themes options would be very welcome. In my opinion, you dropped the ball on this one.
Where has the course navigation setting gone in Rise 360?? It was under settings and the options were free or restricted. With the addition of "themes" I cannot find that navigational feature for my courses now. Help!?
Trying to find a link where anyone can view the intro to themes video? The only one I can locate is only accessed by the owner of the module. Is there an acccessible video for everyone?
Hi - I cant seem to find the theme option in courses where I am not the owner.
This will be an issue for us with the way that we share courses amongst our team.
Is there something I am missing to be able to access this menu option as a course manager?
Thanks!
Will the Theme options be made available to Course Managers? It means I can no longer make any of the changes that used to be under Settings unless I am the Course Owner which limits collaboration.
Thanks
Echoing the previous comments on the theme option being made available to Course Managers, will this be enabled or will we now have to make copies of the courses, delete the originals and reshare with the original course owners to bypass this everytime?
PLEASE FIX THIS ASAP!!! Myself and other team members are managing thousands of courses and you've now suddenly changed the settings, meaning we have NO access to any of the Theme settings.
I cannot understand why this has been actioned without any consultation or even a warning that it's coming. My team are now in a panic and unable to work on the courses.
This is urgent. Please resolve. Thanks.
I am not going to add to the panic that has arrived for some scenarios due to this feature release.
I just want to say that i am looking forward to the ability to create custom themes.
However, will likely only use that feature once (or when company branding changes) - to create the branded version as it i can be, within the rise framework and its limitations.
Question,
How does applying another theme onto an already existing theme work for batch course rebranding? Is this a "change once" and all courses active in the system changes their theme?
interesting to hear / see this demonstrated with all users roles and all its perspectives.
I will not try on my team based on the ongoing forums discussions, i want to be careful with what is done with the feature at this time.
I have the same question. I do not want the arbitrarily assigned images and do not find a way to delete them.
Agree!
Hi Sharon, you can use this link to show the promo video of the new theming features on Youtube (Thanks Adam).
Hi Karen, the navigation setting you are looking for has been moved to the new Themes > Navigation page (Restrict Navigation ON/OFF).
Philip, this is only for authors. Managers cannot see this Themes menu.
Hi there, Anthony! While you can't hide the lesson header completely, the new themes settings allow you to change the height of your lesson header to small, focusing attention on your lesson content. Here's an example where I've used the small setting, and removed the lesson count and author avatar:
I don't have an update on skipping the course start page yet, but we're continuing to work on some exciting changes to courses and lessons!
Thanks, Kristina! We're excited, too. One notable enhancement that the Theme feature brings is improved text contrast. At the lesson level, you'll see text change from white to black depending on what your course theme color is -- lighter theme colors will see black text, and darker theme colors will continue to see white text. Currently, the text changes happen on the Start button, cover image, lesson title, and course navigation elements.
We are going to extend these changes to the lesson level as well. There aren't other changes to overall text color planned at the moment.
Hi Karen! You'll now find navigation settings within the Theme menu. We've got a few detailed articles on the enhancements that the theme feature includes in the Rise 360 User Guide section: Customizing a Course. Currently, only course owners (and not collaborators) will have access to the Theme menu.
@Crystal could you please respond to the numerous queries above about lack of access to Theme/settings for Managers. Thanks.
Thanks Philip. And here's an even better link on YouTube.
Hi there! The custom themes feature is not yet released, and I don't have details about how that will work at this time. However, any changes that you make to a prebuilt theme that you apply to your course currently will only affect the one course. It will not update other courses that are using the same prebuilt theme.
As Dan mentions, only the course owner can change the course settings, including theme, navigation mode, and collaborators. We've made updates in this user guide on how to collaborate with other authors.
Thanks for sharing your feedback on the impact to your collaboration workflow. If we make any changes, I'll share here!