Dress Your E-Learning to the Nines with Custom Player Designs #119

Custom Course Players #119: Challenge | Recap

Can Your Course Be Fully Dressed without a Custom Player?

One of the best ways to step up your e-learning game is to stop using the default options. This includes everything from default colors, buttons, quiz slides, feedback boxes, and even the course player.

There’s nothing wrong with using defaults.They’re designed to help new users focus on what matters most: the content.

But because they’re so easy to access, a lot of course designers will stick with them out of habit, even as their design skills develop beyond them.

Customizing the Look and Feel of Your Course Player

Both Articulate Storyline 2 and Articulate Studio ’13 make it really easy for course designers to customize nearly every aspect of the course player.

Using the Player Properties window, you can control the colors, navigation settings, location of the player menus and tabs, and much more.

With so many options available, there’s no reason not to customize the course player. And that’s what this week’s challenge is all about!

Challenge of the Week

This week, your challenge is to share an example of a customized course player using the built-in player options in Storyline 2 or Studio ’13.

You don’t have to share an entire course. Just share enough so we can get an idea of how you customized your player.

NOTE: This is not a challenge on creating custom menus and navigation. This week’s challenge is all about seeing what’s possible with the options in the Player Properties window.

Sharing Your Custom Players

I expect a lot of you to share your course players.  To make it easier for others to import and manage dozens of new players, please consider giving your player.xml files a unique name. Add your own name to the end or come up with a unique player name.

Resources

Here are some resources to help you get started customizing the player:

Storyline:

Studio ’13:

The following color guides will help you customize your player’s colors:

Customizing the E-Learning Course Player #5

We’re running a similar challenge this week in our screencast challenges. Several users have already shared tips for customizing the course player. If you share an example or download this week, consider recording a quick screencast tutorial to show others how you designed your player.

Last Week’s Challenge

Before you cut a dash in this week’s player challenge, check out the creative examples your fellow community members shared in last week’s labeled graphic challenge:

Using Interactive Markers to Build Labeled Graphics in E-Learning #118

Labeled Graphic Interactions #118: Challenge | Recap

Wishing you a player-ful week, E-Learning Heroes!

New to the E-Learning Challenges?

The weekly challenges are ongoing opportunities to learn, share, and build your e-learning portfolios. You can jump into any or all of the previous challenges anytime you want. I’ll update the recap posts to include your demos.

 

408 Comments
Preston Ruddell

Dang it! I'll settle for second. This is the title slide for a recent project I did for my company. I used the color green for the background (as per our companies branding) and blended the player into the background. The summary bar at the bottom looked like part of a web page instead of part of the "slide". I wanted to get away from an "e-learning" player and try to go for more of a webpage look. I set the story size to 1440 x 900 as this project had a lot of screen casts. Having the story as the same size as my monitor made this easy to work with. The only downside to this story size? Default markers look comically small. It was worth the tradeoff to have clear screencasts with minimal editing. Tempshare: http://s3.amazonaws.com/tempshare-stage.storyline.articulate.com/... Expand

Lauren Franza
Daniela Slater
Mushtaq Ahmed Syed
Dana Kocalis
Tracy Carroll
Ramesh Muthukumarana
Paul Venderley
Ben Hall

Hi, Natasha. You're not seeing dots, but apparently it's not Braille either. For a longer answer here's what the artist said about the topic: "As with the name and the imagery associated with this project, I want things to be open-ended. I want to create a framework for people to project their own ideas and meanings onto. These things have meaning to me personally, but they are what you make them. At least that's how I want it to be. At the core, the dots were a way to remove all names from the posters and covers. Typefaces are loaded with meaning; they imply a time period, evoke ideas of brands, they define too much. I wanted a recognizable symbol that encapsulated the idea of Tycho and ISO50 as a holistic audio / visual project but which didn't imply anything about it. I wanted a k... Expand

Dana Kocalis
Ramesh Muthukumarana
Jane Maduke
Dana Kocalis
Daniela Slater
Lauren Franza
Rachel Craig
Jane Maduke
Lauren Franza
Veronica Budnikas