Elearning and the icon library in Storyline

Sometimes your elearning needs a little something more than text, but not so much as a whole picture. An icon is a great way to add a small visual element that helps emphasize your points, indicate a button, or simplify a topic without taking up much visual space. Storyline comes with a library of assets that includes an extensive selection of icons. Here are some tips on using them when you’re creating your elearning.

Storyline icons are editable

When you add an icon to your elearning in Storyline, you might notice that it is its own type of asset – not a picture, not a shape. It’s listed as Icon # in the timeline. It’s closer to a shape than a picture though, as you can use Shape Fill and Shape Outline just as with another Storyline object. This makes it incredibly easy to include icons that you can customize to the branding of the elearning.

However, many icons are actually groups of shapes, so adding states may present a little more of a challenge. The fastest way to add states in this case may be to make a regular shape with the same formatting as your icon, add states and format those to your liking on the shape, and then use the Format Painter brush to apply it to the whole icon group.

Keyword searching

Sometimes you may have trouble thinking of the right icon to depict a concept or idea. When pulling up the lists of icons in the Storyline asset search, this automatically takes care of the problem. Just enter the word you want an icon for and it’ll populate with a list of possibilities for the idea you want to visualize. Just scroll through and pick the one that works for you.

The only drawback I have found with Storyline’s icon library is that there is no way to narrow your searches down to a specific icon style. If you need a series of icons and you find one you like for one topic, you’ll still have to look through list of results for the next icon you search for to see if there’s one that matches.

It would also be helpful to see what keywords are attached to any given icon in the library. Sometimes I can’t find the right icon and I’ve also run out of ideas for keywords to search for. I would like it if it were possible to select one of the icons I didn’t like to see if it can suggest other keywords to look at fresh list of results.

As it is though, this Storyline feature is quite robust and contains hundreds of possible icons you can use in your elearning, made better by the fact that you can customize the colours right in the program! This goes to show how important icons are to creating great elearning.