F for Font Awesome

Nice visuals are great way of keeping user's interest in online courses and as not every e-learning developer has super awesome designing skills, all the free graphic and icons come in handy in that case. There is a lot of free stuff on the internet to use in your private or commercial projects (always double check the End-user licence agreement to avoid any problems).

Have a closer look at the simple picture above - in terms of designing, these icons are quite easy to draw but you'd still have to spend some time on creating the shapes. I've built this image with 9 clicks only in Storyline 2.

How did I do that? Instead of using shapes, insert... a font! I used here Font Awesome which is a pictographic language of web-related actions and it's free to download. You can use it for commercial projects, open source work or just about whatever you want.

So, once you download the font, open Storyline, create a text box, then insert a symbol and choose Font Awesome from the list. You'll get a nice selection of 605 symbols for social media, communication, transport, presentation, web etc.

All the symbols are fully customizable: you can change their size (increase, decrease font size), color, rotation and they keep their good quality. You can add states to these symbols and use them as buttons or interaction elements, animate them, save and export as images.

I think Font Awesome is a nice alternative to Wingdings symbols (for those of you who work on Windows) and a good option to complement the symbol buttons, which is built-in feature in Storyline.

Let me know how you like it and whether you know any other fonts which can bring added value to any e-learning project. Stay creative and positive :)