It’s an exciting day—after weeks of back-and-forth with your SME, your storyboard has been approved. Yay! It’s finally time for the fun part—building out your course in Storyline 360. But before you get started, try to rein in your excitement and set yourself up for success by following a few best practices that will save you time later on.
1. Choose Your Story Size
It’s a good idea to choose the size of your slides (or Story Size) before you start building out your project. While it’s possible to adjust this setting at any time, changing it later on will likely require rework—especially if you change the aspect ratio (for example, if you want to go from 4:3 to 16:9).
Luckily, if you do end up needing to change the size of your slides down the road, Storyline 360 gives you the option of scaling or cropping your designs to minimize the amount of rework you need to do, as shown in the .GIF below:
2. Create Color & Font Themes
If you already know what colors and fonts you want to use in your project, setting up color and font themes from the get-go is a great way to streamline the course-building process.
That’s because these features allow you to change the colors and fonts used throughout your project in just a few clicks. This can be a huge time-saver if you end up needing to adjust your colors or want to swap out one font for another after building out your slides.
This feature is such a time-saver that we use it in all our Content Library 360 templates, making it super-easy to update them to match your brand guidelines. Check out the .GIF below to see how it works:
If you’ve never used color or font themes before, these tutorials offer step-by-step instructions:
And for some insider tips on theme colors, check out these resources:
3. Customize Slide & Feedback Masters
Since you’ve already created your storyboard, you should know what kind of layouts you’ll need for your project. Instead of building your slides and layers one by one, start by creating slide and feedback masters.
Slide and feedback masters allow you to build out your layouts once and apply them to multiple slides or layers. That’s right— the Feedback Masters feature works not only for feedback layers but for all slide layers! If this is news to you, check out This Little-Known Storyline Feature Will Save You Tons of Time to learn more.
These powerful features will not only ensure layout consistency throughout your project, but they’ll make it faster and easier to update your layouts later on if need be.
Here are some tutorials to help you get up to speed on using slide and feedback masters:
More Resources
Following these simple steps will help ensure the course-building process is smooth sailing—even if you end up needing to make changes down the line. For more pro tips on optimizing course creation in Storyline 360, check out these resources:
- Storyboard Like a Pro with Storyline 360 and Review 360
- 4 Time-Saving Storyline 360 Features You Need to Know About
- 4 Ways to Make the Most of the Storyline 360 Media Library
- 4 Tips for Optimizing the Translation of Your Storyline 360 Courses
Want to try Storyline 360 out for yourself, but don’t have Articulate 360? Start a free 30-day trial, and come back to E-Learning Heroes regularly for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning. If you have any questions, please share them in the comments.
Published 5 years ago
Version 1.0
