Basics of starting to build your elearning in storyline
So you’ve gotten all your content organized, you’ve decided on your themes and colours, now you’re ready to start putting it into Storyline! Before you really start coding though, here are some basic things you can change about the default settings in your Storyline template before you have to make changes and adjustments for everything later.
Your elearning aspect ratio
The default computer screen size and aspect ratio is wider and at a higher resolution than it used to be, so why start with the default Storyline 720x540 (4:3) ratio? If you start building your course and then upgrade the size and resolution later, this may throw off all your slide layouts and font sizes. We prefer to use 1280x720 (16:9) for the widescreen ratio, which also looks good on most mobile screens. This works best without the sidebar menu, which we normally place as a dropdown from the top right menu bar. If you are using a sidebar menu, the 4:3 ratio works better so that it doesn’t add to the course width.
To change your course size, select the Design tab and Story Size Setup on the left of the ribbon.
Your elearning brand colours
When working with brand or identity guidelines, the client will give you all the approved colours and fonts for your course. To add these into your Storyline theme, you select Design, then Colours, and Create New Theme Colours at the bottom of the drop down.
This will display the palette of default colours for your elearning. We generally adjust only the accent colours to the branded colours to be used, and keep the default white, black, navy and off white as the Text/Background colours.
To change an accent colour, click on the colour swatch next to one of the Accent options, and then More Colours for the full range of options. Here you can enter the RGB or Hex code values for the approved colours. Once you have set all the required colours and saved the new Theme with a name, these will become the new default colours for any shapes, objects, buttons, text, etc. you want to add into your elearning.
Your elearning fonts
You can also set the default fonts to align with your brand guides instead of changing the font selection every time you create a text box. Select Fonts just below the Colours option in the Design tab, and Create New Theme Fonts at the bottom of the drop down.
Here, you can select the Heading font and the Body font, if there are different ones specified for titles and body text, and save your font Theme.
Your elearning master slides
Finally, go into the Master Slide View, and make sure your new Colour and Font themes are applied to your slide master in the main tab under Themes. This ensures that when you are building your master slides, they are also using the correct colours and fonts, and will be automatically applied to new slides you create from the available layouts based on the slide master.
Now you’re all set up and ready to start programming!
For more great time saving tips for programming elearning, check out the rest of our blog, or contact us at info@pathwaysinc.com!
