Storyline: Course Certificate Template
Do you want to reward learners with a certificate when they successfully complete a course? Then download this certificate of completion template to use in your own projects. This template uses the print slide trigger in Storyline 360, which allows learners to print the contents of a specific slide. Explore this project.Make Over Your Rise 360 Course in 4 Easy Steps With Themes
Rise 360 has always been a fantastic tool for creating courses fast. And with the templates and other flexible options, even people without graphic design experience can feel confident that their Rise 360 projects will always look polished and professional. That’s why we’re so excited about Rise 360 themes. Themes give you even more ways to put your unique spin on the look and feel of your Rise 360 courses. And just like everything else about Rise 360, the themes feature makes creating beautifully designed courses easy—no graphic design skills needed. So let’s take a closer look at four easy steps you can follow to refresh your overall course design with a new theme, pique your learners’ interest with cover pages and lesson headers, reinforce your branding, and customize the course navigation experience. Step 1: Update the Overall Course Design With a New Theme The easiest way to give your course’s visual design a little facelift is to choose from the three prebuilt themes included in Rise 360. These themes are great for setting the overall look and feel of your project in one fell swoop. Let’s look at how to choose a theme and the available theme options, below. Choosing a Theme Start by opening any existing Rise 360 course on your Rise 360 dashboard. Select Theme in the upper right corner, and then click Change Theme. Rise 360 includes three professionally designed, ultra-stylish themes—Rise, the classic theme you’ve come to know (but with a few more customization options), plus two brand-new ones: Apex and Horizon. Following is a quick overview of each theme. Rise Our original theme, Rise, always looks modern and clean—a tried-and-true design choice that never goes out of style. Apex For a bold, contemporary, and striking design with angular finishes, choose Apex. Horizon When you want to give your course an elegant, sharp, and stylish makeover—complete with understated flourishes—Horizon is a great choice. They’re all so beautiful, right? Not sure which theme works best for your content? We’ve got you covered! Check out 3 Ways to Use Themes to Tailor Your Rise 360 Projects for some pro pointers. Once you’ve decided on a theme for your project, click to select it and you’ll see it applied to your project in the adjacent preview pane. Being able to preview your theme choice is handy because if you’re not in love with it, you can simply click another one. And if it’s love at first sight, click Save to apply it to your project. While you can use each theme as is, you also have loads of options for customizing key theme elements such as the cover page, lesson headers, and other features of the user interface, like colors, fonts, and navigation. We’ll explore some of these customization options in the next few steps. Step 2: Grab Learners’ Attention With a Custom Cover Page and Lesson Headers A cover page is your first opportunity to grab a learner’s attention, so why not customize it to fit the course topic or your company branding and really make it count? Select Cover Page from the menu and pick a stylish layout. If you’re opting to add a course image to your cover page, you can upload your own image or browse the wide selection of royalty-free, attribution-free images available in Content Library 360, which is built right into Rise 360. Pro Tip: You can also crop images directly in Rise 360. That means no hassling with a separate image editing app to tailor your course images to your project. To make your theme branded, upload your logo too. Customizing the Lesson Header option is another nice way to draw learners in and direct their attention to your content. You can choose from a variety of header designs or customize them with your own color or image. You can even adjust lesson headers to make them taller or shorter to create more or less white space, as you can see in the GIF above. Step 3: Reinforce Your Brand Identity With Custom Colors and Fonts The design choices we’ve walked through so far are quick but powerful ways to transform your course, but they’re really just the tip of the creative iceberg! You can also brand your course with custom colors and fonts to make sure it more fully aligns with your brand guidelines. Colors You can choose the Colors option to customize course accents like the menu and progress bar. Rise 360 makes picking eye-catching colors easy with curated options you can apply with a single click. But what if you need to bring in your official brand shades? No problem. Choose the Custom feature and select any color you’d like. Fonts Another easy way to brand your Rise 360 projects is to customize the fonts. Choose the Fonts option to find the perfect typeface for your project. Not sure where to start? Try the Recommended pairings—a fast way to make sure your headings and body fonts go together perfectly. For even more flexibility, click More to browse a selection of pre-installed options. And if you want to use your official brand fonts, just click Manage Custom Fonts to upload the ones you need and use them throughout your course. Step 4: Complete the Transformation With Custom Navigation and Button Styles You’ve got the cover page, lesson headers, colors and fonts fine-tuned. The final step in making over your Rise 360 course is to customize course navigation and button styles. Navigation In Rise 360, you’ve always had the option to show, hide, or disable the sidebar navigation. And now we’ve added more ways to customize course navigation so you can create the perfect experience for your learners. To start exploring your options, choose Navigation. Both Compact and Overlay navigation are great for making your content the star of the show. Choose Compact navigation to tuck your lesson menu away in a corner, where it can be quickly expanded with a click when learners need it. Another great option is Overlay navigation. When learners need to view the menu, they simply click the ☰ (hamburger) icon and the menu overlays the lesson, filling the screen. Love keeping things familiar? The always reliable Sidebar menu is a great choice with more options to choose from. Don’t want to include a navigation menu at all? No problem. You can remove it entirely—just as you’ve always been able to do in Rise 360. Buttons Want to continue customizing your course? Don’t forget about button options! Pick the button color that’s right for your course or branding. You can even refine your Previous and Next buttons by making them full width or floating—or you can remove them entirely. It’s totally up to you! Want to see how themes and custom settings can be combined for different effects? Check out the following example course. We present the same content three different ways and with minimal customizations so you can see for yourself. Explore Horizon Explore Apex Explore Rise Customizations: compact navigation, large header height Customizations: overlay navigation, small header height, custom color Customizations: sidebar navigation, medium header height, custom color Wrap-Up Not only does the themes feature give you a host of new ways to express yourself, wow your learners, and brand your Rise 360 content, it’s also streamlined the course creation process by consolidating theme settings all in one place—right at the top of the authoring environment in Rise 360. With so many options to customize your project's look and feel, you can rest assured knowing that whichever professionally designed theme you choose, your course will look fantastic on any device. And all of these thoughtful features and enhancements mean Rise 360 just keeps making it easier to create stunningly unique and stylish courses your learners will love. For more tips and inspiration on how you can start using themes in your e-learning, check out these helpful resources: Quickly Create Uniquely Stunning Courses with Rise 360 Themes 3 Ways to Use Rise 360 Themes to Tailor Your Projects How to Brand Your Rise 360 Course Want to try the new Rise 360 themes 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.Storyline 360: Adaptive Scenario Template
Learn to work with Storyline's variables to create custom branching scenarios that adapt to the learner's performance in the e-learning course. You'll work with Storyline's built-in quiz and results slides to generate the scoring variables. Then, using conditional triggers, you'll redirect users based on their point levels during the course. Learn more about this project: View demo: View the final projectRise 360: Spotting and Managing Burnout
Take some time to go through this course to see if you’re at risk of workplace burnout. Interested in creating a self-assessment like the one in this example? Then download and edit the story file to include in your own Rise 360 course. View this project in action.Storyline: Personalize E-Learning with Variables and Toggle Buttons
This Storyline 360 template uses toggle buttons and true-false variables to demonstrate creative ways to personalize your e-learning courses. Learners can choose whether to include narration, background graphics, and photographic or illustrated characters. View the project in actionStoryline: Personalized Decision Matrix
Do you have a lot on your to-do list and don’t know where to start? This interactive Eisenhower Decision Matrix will help you manage your professional and personal tasks more efficiently. When you’re done, you can print your personalized task matrix and use it to boost your productivity. Explore this project. To learn more about how I designed this template, check out this article. And if you’d like to see two other example courses that teach these same concepts, head on over to this article.Why and How to Create a Branded Prototype in Storyline 360
Take a look at the following images. Can you name each company? Pretty easy, right? Without words, you can still identify each brand. Beyond a recognizable logo or brand mark, branding is a company’s identity. It’s part of their story. It shows who they are as a company, what they care about, and what they do. And because branding is such an important aspect of a company’s identity, there will be times when a company requests that their online training reflect their brand. To ensure the course you create is in line with the brand guidelines, it’s a good idea to create a prototype before you get too far along in the development process. That way you can get feedback and make adjustments before building out the entire course. Now that you understand why it’s important to start with a prototype when you’re creating a branded course, let’s take a closer look at how to do it! Study the Company’s Brand Taking the time to understand a company’s brand can help you capture the essence of their brand in your course design. Does the brand convey a youthful and energizing tone? Or maybe a modern and muted design? It’s all in the details—from colors to image choices to typography. Studying and adapting these elements into your projects could help you narrow in on a course design that mirrors a similar tone. Here are some things you can do to ensure the course you create embraces the company’s brand. Look at the branding guide Branding guides include a lot of helpful information, ranging from typeface and logo variations to color palette, imagery guidelines, etc. If you’re unable to obtain a branding guide from the company, search for it online. For larger companies, you might get lucky and find one in your search results. Just make sure it’s up-to-date. Check out their website Companies spend a lot of money building websites that match their branding guidelines. Take some time to explore each page and read what they’re about. Look at the formatting of the text and the layout of each page. As you click on or hover over objects on the screen, what design elements do you notice? What types of images do they use—clean and simple or colorful and lively? Are the buttons rounded or rectangular? How do they behave? What other design details do you notice? Watch their online videos Videos are another great asset to help you understand a company’s brand in a new way. Oftentimes, you can find branded videos on a company’s YouTube, Vimeo, or other video platform page. Pay close attention to the animations, language, and type of music they use. Do most of their videos incorporate voiceover, or do they tend to rely on on-screen graphics and text to convey their message? You might want to include similar elements in your project. Visit their social media pages A company’s social media can be a great resource for design ideas. Some companies even hire people to specifically design branded online content they can post. View the content they share and look carefully at the design of their images, ads, or GIFs. These assets might serve as an inspiration for your slide designs. Search for PowerPoints or other documents online It can be super helpful to see additional examples of branding used in other creative ways. Some companies have a bunch of branded PPTs and PDFs searchable online, but they can be hard to find. For specific results, try searching—filetype:PDF <Company Name> or filetype:PPT <Company Name>. Here are examples of what that looks like: This will pull up a list of company-branded documents or presentations that are generally full of design ideas that you can use for your project. Check the dates to ensure the branding is up-to-date. Create a Prototype Once you have a solid grasp of a company’s brand, it’s time to apply those elements into a company-branded Storyline 360 prototype. A prototype is a halfway point between a storyboard and the final version of a course. I find that a prototype gives stakeholders a preview of what the entire course experience will be like. Another great use of a branded prototype is to streamline the development of a series of micro-learning courses in Storyline 360. I’ll choose the storyboard with the least amount of content and then build out a prototype so stakeholders can see an example. It’s a great way to get feedback and make adjustments before building out the entire series. So that’s when and why you should create a branded prototype. Let’s take a closer look at how to do it! Creating a branded prototype in Storyline 360 To show you how to create a branded prototype, let’s use this mock-up My Pet website. I’ll walk you through how to incorporate this company’s brand identity into a Storyline 360 prototype. Start with a blank template When you first create a new project in Storyline 360, it defaults to a story size of 4:3 with default navigation buttons and other slide properties. I recommend changing your slide size before adding content to your course so you don’t have to worry about reworking your slide design later. I like to use a blank story template that defaults to the story size 16:9, with the default next/previous buttons unselected so I can create my own custom navigation on each slide. I also edited other slide properties and player features. Of course, there are many ways to go about setting up your own project templates. This is just how I prefer to have my projects set up so I don’t have to make the same edits every time I create a new Storyline 360 project. If you’re an Articulate 360 Team Subscriber, you can share your template using Team Slides in Storyline 360 so everyone on your team can easily access it and reuse it. Create a branded color theme You can completely customize the default color theme to match the company’s brand. All you have to do is create a new color theme and input the branded color codes from the company’s branding guide. If you don’t have access to the branding guide, you can still create a branded color theme for your project by using the eyedropper tool in Storyline 360 to color-pick the prominent colors off the company website. I like to name the color theme the same as the company so it’s easy to find and select when creating other projects. Create a new theme font Use the company’s approved fonts or find ones that closely match to create a new theme font. If you plan to share the story file with another person to edit, then you might want to stick with standard fonts that closely match the branded fonts. One easy way to find a matching font is to type out a sentence from the company website into your project. Have the website open on one side of the screen and your Storyline project open on the other. Because Storyline 360 allows you to preview the font before selecting it, you can simply highlight the text in your project and slowly hover over each font option until you find one that matches the website font. Check out this article for more info on working with text in Storyline 360. If you still can’t find a good matching font, try searching—dupe for <font name> or alternative to <font name>. Customize slides Now it’s time to build your slides. Reference the website, branding guide, online videos, social media pages, and other documentation you researched earlier to guide your slide designs. If you’ve already created a storyboard, pull content from that and build the slides you want to showcase. This might include a title slide, content slides, a complex interaction, and quiz slides. Use master slides and feedback masters to significantly reduce your development time, especially if you plan to use similar layouts throughout your project. Want to see an example? Then check out how I interpreted this My Pet company brand … … into this My Pet Company Branded Prototype. Customize the player The last thing you’ll want to do is customize the player so it matches the rest of your course. To do that, start by opening the Home tab and clicking on Player Properties. From there, click on Colors & Effects and choose Custom. Here you can choose a custom accent and background color, You can also personalize the accessibility focus colors, which highlight clickable objects when learners navigate with their keyboard. For this example, I chose a pink accent color and a white background so it’s cohesive with my slide designs. Depending on how many of the player elements you’ve activated, you’ll see more or less of the accent color. In this example, I’ve unchecked everything except the accessibility controls, so the player pretty much blends into the background: But if I turn on more of the player elements, you can see more of the accent color that I chose: See how sleek it looks when the player and slide designs match? It gives your course a more cohesive feel. Wrap-Up By using all of these tips, you can create your own e-learning courses that visually embrace a company’s brand identity. Do you have any other tips or tricks you like to use when branding your Storyline 360 courses? Let me know in the comments below! Need to brand a Rise 360 course? Then check out this article to help you get started. Want to try something you learned here, 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.
