Personalise and refine your design space with colour, views, indenting and more
Admin
Updated:
December 5, 2024
Overview
This article covers how you can customise your design space. As the design editor, you can decide how to use colour, layouts and set content hierarchies to reflect the design you are creating.
Contains
Set colours - for Sections and Content Items in your designs.
Make space for large designs - change how content items wrap (or not!).
Indent and outdent - to nest learning, show richer structures and set parent/child items.
Expand and shrink - to view, or hide, all the content items in sections.
Terminology
Content hierarchy - a way to show how design parts relate to each other.
Wrap - much like a document, lines of text stop and form a new line.
No-wrap - unlike a page of text, without wrapping the line will continue horizontally.
Ready? Let's personalise our design space 🧑🏻🎨
Use colours for sections and content items
Step: Select a content item and then select the colour picker from the toolbar
Selecting an item to change it's colour
Step: Select a colour from the pallet
Selecting a colour
Step: Select the colour picker and select a colour from the rainbow!
Seeing the new colour selected
Your items can be coloured however is helpful for you and your team
Tip: You will build up your own pallet of colours for quick re-use on future items.
Step: Select the Selection colour picker - to make all content items change colour.
Changing the colour of all items in a section
Tip: You can use your own colour system to decide on the colours that mean the most to you.
Guidance
Colours can be used to signal various aspects within a design. Use them to signal a learning type, the status, flagging items that need attention, a topic or theme that occurs across the design or something else! The choice is yours.
Make space for large designs
Aim: The aim is to give you more visual space for larger designs. Lengthy vertical scrolls can be avoided by using either the no wrap or row views - both turn sections into more slimline views - which is super helpful when you have many content items.
Step: Select the Details screen & scroll down to Designer view:
Changing the layout from the Details screen
Step: Change the view mode to No wrapping for your design
Selecting 'no wrapping' to have items span across the screen horizontally
Step: Your design is now in the no wrap mode! Scroll left and right to see your content items.
The no-wrap wider view
Tip: With no wrapping - you can scroll right (and left) to view content items in larger sections
Viewing your design with more horizontal space
Step: Return to the Details tab and select the Rows view - to set your design view into the slim view
The 'rows' view
Set content hierarchy with indenting and outdenting
Aim: You can set up sections that contain nested sections and content items. This gives you more scope to set up structures that more accurately reflect the layers or structures within your design.
Step: Select the crosshair / 4-way arrow icon - this enables the indent/outdent buttons to appear in the Section toolbar.
Setting the 'move' icon in the toolbar
Step: Indent the sections that need to be nested.
Indenting sections with the left / right arrows
Tip: Indented sections will then become nested within the section above them. You can move sections up and down, the nesting will be retained within that section.You can nest sections up to 5 levels deep. Each depth is reflected by the visible bars and deeper nested colour. Example with 0, 1 and 2 sections nested / indented depth:
Setting up a hierarchy
Tip: You can add sections with no content items, to provide a heading for the indented Sections that live within in - as shown in our images with 'Week 1'.
Optional step: Outdent a nested section to return it to a 'normal' level.
Step: Select the left-side outdent button to move a section to the left, or remove the nesting altogether.
Returning a section to the left (outdenting)
Shrink or Expand sections - to maximise visibility
Aim: You can show or hide sections to maximise your view, hide content you don't always need to see and give space for your current working area. The view you create, with sections hidden (collapsed) or shown (expanded) will be personalised for you. Other editors in the design get their own expanded / collapsed view. Users who can Review & Comment will always be able to see all sections - they can't shrink or expand sections.
Step: Shrink a single section - select the shrink icon for any section
Shrinking sections to get more visible space
You can now see the section, but the content items have been hidden.
Step: Expand the section, to reveal the content items
Expanding sections to see all the contents
Step: Shrink several sections
Working with more space and focus on the priority sections during your design process
Tip: Once you start using shrink or expand, you will see how it can help give you more visual space. This helps give you focus on the current design priority areas.
Step: Shrink all sections - toggle the Search and Filters toolbar, then select the Shrink all sections icon.
Toggling all sections to show / hide
Once you've shrunk all sections - you'll get a simple, condensed view of your design:
A condensed design view
Tip: This view is saved as your own personal view of the design, so you can shrink all sections and then expand sections as/when needed. This is helpful for larger designs, with lots of content items & sections.
Next steps
Review your designs and consider the best view and layouts for you.
Consider your content item hierarchy and use indenting to help set up robust structures
Build out larger designs, knowing you can expand / shrink views as needed.
