Overview

I’ve been meaning to participate in an E-Learning Heroes Challenge for quite some time and decided that this week is the week to do it! The challenge was to create a slide, demo, or design comp that features blurred backgrounds. I wanted my blur to be purposeful, beyond just having a solid design.

I was racking my brain trying to think about how I would tackle this challenge and ended up in a team meeting. My background was blurred because, to be honest, my office was a bit messy. That’s when I got the idea for Virtual Interview Tip #1: blur your background!

To build the course, I started out with a background image of a messy room (Canva). I exported the image and created two states: “Blur” and “Normal.”

It turns out that Storyline doesn’t have a blur effect built into the program, so I ended up opening up my Media Library. I selected the image, clicked the “edit” icon, and clicked on Adobe Illustrator.

Once in Adobe Illustrator, I added the Gaussian Blur effect and re-exported as a .svg file. I’ve heard that I should be able to save the photo and have it immediately update in Storyline’s Media Library, but I couldn’t get it to work. If you are reading this, and you know how to do it, send help!

Next, I added my characters from Storyline. Laura and Renita. Considering the content, I thought it would be funny to have Renita express emotion about Laura’s messy background and added a new state called “Happy.” I cropped an office background for Renita and resized the images until they resembled what you would see in a video conference.

I added the title and body text, using both serif and sans serif to show visual contrast; however, I still kept them close in proximity for aesthetic reasons. Then, it was just a matter of add buttons and setting up my triggers:

—And there you have it! I had so much fun participating in this week’s challenge, and I imagine that I will check it out next week, too. If you want to download the file, click the button below.

Responsibilities

Instructional Design, eLearning Development

Tools Used

Articulate Storyline, Adobe Illustrator, Canva

Year

2022