From the course: Articulate 360: Advanced Actions

Working with Content Library characters - Storyline Tutorial

From the course: Articulate 360: Advanced Actions

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Working with Content Library characters

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- [Instructor] One way you can ditch the one size fits all course design model is by giving learners more control and options to personalize their learning experiences. And letting learners choose their own characters to represent them is a great start. So let's go ahead and get started. I'm going to drill down into this first slide, and let's add a couple characters to our project. I like working with the Modern Illustrated, so I'm just going to grab the first four characters here. Fast way I might work is to Control + click + drag this character a couple times just to make the copies of her, and then I can select each character, come up here to the Design tab on the ribbon and choose Character to replace her. I don't know if it's any faster, just feels faster. I'll work that way, select Lily again, and let's replace Lily from Modern Illustrated with Shannon, and then we will add this last character here for Amber. All right, cool, four characters. Let's align them on the slide. So drag a selection around all four of them, and Format tab up here on the ribbon, let's align them, distribute them horizontally and them make sure they're all standing on equal ground. There we go, they're all distributed to the bottom, aligned to the bottom now. All right, so the way this is going to work is we want to to be able to click one and see it selected. There's a lot of different styles we could use, right? We could add a glow around them. We could add a check mark or a name. One technique that I kind of like is to start with the characters a little bit muted, right? A little reduced contrast, and then when you select them, then they become full color, full contrast. So here's what this looks like. Choose States, Edit States, and this'll be our Normal state obviously. Create a New State for Selected. Selected means that's the state that they will show when they're clicked. That I want to keep, I'm going to jump back over here to Normal. Right click the character anywhere and then choose Format Picture down here from the bottom. And what I'm going to do is reduce the contrast for the Normal state. So I'm just going to drag that down somewhere around 70, like that, 65 is fine. Now it will affect the Selected state, so I need to come back into the Selected state, make sure my character is selected, and then for contrast I'm going to add this to zero and then just tab away from it. So that'll keep the Selected state brighter, full contrast, and the Normal state will be a little just reduced contrast, not as clear. Click Done Editing States. Close out of your Format Picture window. Now rather than going through that process one by one for the other characters, I'm just going to double click the Format Painter. Double clicking it means this Format Painter will remain persistent, so I can apply her styles, her effects, to the other characters. So you see that little paint brush icon next to my cursor. Click once on Andrew, there he is, right, Shannon, and Amber, cool. Click away from the slide or press the Escape key to deselect the Format Painter. The last step right now is to apply a button set to these characters. And the reason I need to do that is that if I click each one, they're always going to show, well let's just take a look at it. This is the benefit of button sets. So if I click each character, they become fully selected, right? If I click them again they become deselected. But I only want one of these characters selected. So what I can do, I'm going to close out of the Preview, is drag a selection around all of them to multi-select them, then anywhere on the outside selection, right, when you see that four arrow cursor, right click and choose Button Set, Button Set 1. Whoa, nothing really visibly happens here, but check it out when we preview this. This is really cool, this is probably one of the best kept little hidden features. Click one, and click another, and notice how only one of these characters will show a Selected state at one time. All right, cool, we set up our characters, we added a Selected state, did a little bit of formatting, visual formatting to the characters, and added a button set to create a toggle effect for the selected character.

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