Maximize Adobe Captivate for engaging courses: use new visual features to create impressive content.

Exploring Visual Properties in Adobe Captivate

As an experienced eLearning developer, I stumbled upon a fascinating blog post that delves into the Visual Properties panel in Adobe Captivate. This panel offers a multitude of customization options at various levels – slide, block, and component.

The blog post goes into depth about customizing visuals at each level, providing practical examples to illustrate the concepts. The ability to tweak visual elements at distinct levels adds depth and creativity to course design, enhancing user engagement and learning retention.

Mastering Slide-Level Visual Customization

One of the highlights discussed in the post is the customization of slide-level visual properties. By simply selecting a slide and accessing the Visual Properties panel, developers can modify elements such as the slide background color using the color picker tool. This feature empowers eLearning designers like me to create visually appealing and cohesive courses that resonate with learners.

• Solid background: To change the slide background color, leverage the color picker tool to select a color that aligns with the course theme or enhances visual appeal.

Enhancing Course Design with Visual Elements

Visual elements play a crucial role in engaging learners and conveying information effectively. The blog post sheds light on leveraging Adobe Captivate’s Visual Properties to enhance course design, making it more interactive and visually stimulating.

If you’re interested in delving deeper into creating captivating eLearning courses using Adobe Captivate’s Visual Properties, I highly recommend checking out the source blog.

• You can choose between linear, radial, or image backgrounds from the solid background drop-down menu.

• Linear background: Allows for a gradual shade change in a straight line from the start to the end.
• Radial background: Enables a gradual shade change in a circular pattern from the start to the end.
• Image background: Allows the inclusion of an image as a background by selecting it from the Asset panel or your computer.

• Border: Check the box to add a border to the slide. You can customize the border’s style, color, and size.

• Design Options: The Design Options let you personalize slides to match your vision by adjusting the visual appearance and modifying text and media blocks.

Note: Design Options for slide-level customization are only available for pre-designed slide layouts.

Custom slides created using text, widgets, and media blocks do not have design options available.

Customize Block-Level Visual Properties

A block consists of various elements like text, media, interactive components, and widgets. For a block, you can adjust the following:

• Alignment and spacing: Change the width of text or media blocks and add padding to the top and bottom of the content.

• Content slider: The Content width slider and Horizontal padding are connected. When you move the slider from the left side, the left padding value changes, and when you move it from the right side, the right padding value changes. The same adjustment occurs in the Content width slider when you modify the left or right Horizontal padding values.
• Autofit height: The Autofit height checkbox automatically adjusts the height of the content block for the best fit, causing the Vertical padding option to disappear from the properties panel. If there is extra space, padding will be added to the top and bottom as needed.
• Responsive behavior: Elements’ responsive behavior is achieved using a mix of pixel (px) units for top and bottom margins and percentage (%) units for left and right margins. This setup allows for flexible width while keeping the height fixed, a common practice in responsive design. Additionally, using percentages for the height can create a more proportional appearance, while pixels offer a more predictable look. A fluid height illusion is created by incorporating percentage padding and positioning elements to achieve a 16:9 ratio for optimal display.
• Content spacing: The Content spacing option, found under Alignment and Spacing for widget blocks, determines how much spacing you want between the components of the widget block, affecting how dense or spread out they appear. Note that the Vertical padding option is not available for widget blocks.

The following table illustrates different visual aspects of alignment and spacing with varying settings for different components:

Blocks	Alignment and Spacing in Visual Properties
Text
Media
Interactive Components	Input Field
Widgets	Flip Cards (Dense Spacing with a content spacing slider on the extreme left)

Below is a simplified version of the provided text: — Widgets Flip Cards (Sparse Spacing with a content spacing slider on the extreme right) Design Options: The Design Options feature in Adobe Captivate allows you to customize the appearance of selected blocks to match your vision. You can resize text and media blocks, tweak appearance, style, layout, color, and shapes of objects to achieve the desired look and feel easily. The following images demonstrate various visual aspects of the Design Options feature with different settings for various components. Blocks | Design Options in Visual Properties — | — Media | Single Character Text | Two columns text Interactive Components | Radio Buttons Widgets | Click to reveal Components: You can incorporate titles, captions, text bodies, images, and more in different content blocks. Card: The “Card” component can be visually fine-tuned by adjusting its background, border, padding, and shadows. Blocks | Components in Visual Properties — | — Text | List —

Slide Video
Interactive Component	Dropdown
Widgets	Carousel

• Appearance: Customize the appearance of your content block as desired. Modify the background, add borders, or include shadows to boost its visual appeal.

Blocks	Appearance in Visual Properties
Text	Text with background color = #E5D5D3 and border.
Media	Image with background color = #E5D5D3, border, and inner shadow.
Interactive Component	Input field with background color = #E5D5D3 and inner shadow.
Widgets	Tabs with background color = #E5D5D3, content background color = #FFFFFF, and card background color = #F1EEE6. Card specifications:

Customize Component-Level Visual Properties

• Appearance: Fine-tune the appearance of blocks based on available options for each category.
• Text: Modify the font of a text component, apply presets, change colors, and more.
The Visual Properties panel in Adobe Captivate allows instructional designers and course developers to create visually appealing course designs by adjusting various visual elements. This customization not only improves the look of the course but also helps in engaging learners effectively. Here are some key features and options available in the Visual Properties panel: – Image: Apply filters and edit images by adjusting blur, brightness, and contrast settings. You can replace images from the Asset panel or upload new ones. – Card: Customize padding, background, border, and drop shadow for cards using different options. – Widgets: Widgets consist of text, images, and cards that can be further customized by changing states, shapes, text, and icons for tabs, hotspots, carousel arrows, timeline nodes, and more. These tools and features empower users to create visually stunning and engaging e-learning experiences.