How to Create Clearer Course Hierarchy in Rise 360

When everything in a Rise 360 lesson feels equally important, learners have to work harder than they should. A few hierarchy distinctions—size, spacing, color, and placement—can make the path through your content feel much more intentional and easier to navigate.

Articulate Rise Design Tip: Use these 3 Mighty Features to create important course hierarchy

In this walkthrough, Amy—Design Director at Maestro, the creators of Mighty—takes a standard Rise template and uses Mighty to make some targeted hierarchical adjustments, resulting in a clear and purposeful path for leaners to follow.

Why hierarchy matters in a Rise lesson#

Hierarchy is how you guide a learner’s attention through content with clarity and purpose. In practical course-design terms, it helps answer questions like:

• What should the learner notice first?
• Which content belongs together?
• Where does one idea end and the next begin?
• What can the learner scan quickly, and what deserves more attention?

These questions matter because weak hierarchy adds cognitive load. If every heading, list, statement, and image treatment has the same visual weight, learners have to infer the structure on their own. Strong hierarchy does some of that work for them.

In Rise, you already have a list of structural elements: lessons, blocks, headings, lists, Continue buttons, and prebuilt templates. But there are a few places where native settings can feel tight—especially when brand standards or visual clarity call for more control. That’s where Mighty gives you a little more freedom to make intentional design decisions.

Start with the obvious hierarchy: fonts and theme color#

In the video, Amy begins with one of Rise’s built-in templates. Before adjusting individual blocks, she has already changed:

• The heading font
• The body font
• The theme color

A bolder heading font naturally gives the page more structure as learners scroll. Even before you fine-tune individual blocks, headings begin to act like signposts.

If you’re working under brand requirements, this is often where you start anyway: choose the approved fonts and theme color first, then evaluate whether the lesson still needs stronger visual hierarchy.

1. Make the main introduction heading truly feel primary#

In the example lesson, the first heading introduces the section, with several subsections below it. The issue is that everything initially feels a little too similar in terms of importance.

For this design, she wants the introduction heading to feel bigger and bolder than the subsection headings below it. Here’s how she accomplishes that:

1. Select the main introduction heading block in the Rise editor.
2. Open Mighty’s Rich Text Editor.
3. Increase the heading size to fit your needs (in the video, Amy bumps it up to 64).
4. Adjust the line height so the larger heading still feels controlled and readable.

Your primary heading should look primary. If the top-level idea and the supporting sections are too similar in scale, learners don’t get a clear visual cue about how the content is organized.

The key is restraint. You’re not making every heading huge—just the one that needs to carry the most weight.

2. Add breathing room with padding#

Amy says it plainly in the video: “Everything feels so crunched and tight right now.”

That’s a familiar problem. Blocks can look polished individually, but when several are stacked together, the spacing sometimes makes related and unrelated ideas feel too close together.

To fix that, she adjusts padding around the main heading area:

1. Select the block you want to emphasize.
2. Use Mighty to increase the padding.
3. Preview the section to make sure the added space helps guide the eye rather than creating a gap that feels accidental.

More padding around an important heading gives the learner a visual pause. It says, “This is a new section. Pay attention here.”

Spacing is a key component of hierarchy. It is also one of the easiest ways to make a course feel more polished without changing the content itself.

3. Keep supporting headings at the standard level#

After enlarging the introduction heading, Amy keeps the H2 headings at their standard size.

If you enlarge everything, you flatten the hierarchy again. The design works because the main heading becomes visually dominant while the H2 headings continue to support the structure underneath it.

4. Tame distracting bulleted lists#

Bulleted lists are useful in Rise courses, but they can also become visually noisy. In the example, the bullets feel too prominent and too far away from the text.

Amy uses Mighty to refine the list treatment. Here’s how:

1. Select the bulleted list block.
2. Adjust the bullet size to Small.
3. Reduce the text padding so the bullets sit closer to the list text.
4. Change the space between list items to Medium.

These are small changes, but they make the list easier to scan. The bullets still do their job, but they stop competing with the content.

This is especially helpful when the list is supporting information rather than the main event. The learner should see the structure of the list without being pulled away from the meaning of each item.

5. Use spacing to show what belongs together#

One of the most insightful moments in the walkthrough is when Amy compares the spacing inside a numbered section to the spacing between sections.

If the space between related blocks is the same as or larger than the space before the next section, the learner gets a mixed signal. The layout is saying, “These might not belong together,” even when the content says they do.

Amy’s adjustment is simple:

1. Reduce padding between blocks that belong to the same section.
2. Add more padding before the next numbered section.
3. Repeat the same pattern for each section so the rhythm feels consistent.

In the example, she wants the learner to understand that this information belongs with number one, and then we jump to number two.

There is also an honest Rise limitation here. Amy points out one area where the Rise setting is already at zero, but the spacing is still bigger than she’d like. In that case, she works with what’s available by adding space below the related area, helping the next section feel more clearly separated.

6. Add color when the content shifts#

After the one-through-five content, the example course moves into a statement that is related but not part of the same numbered flow. To make that shift clearer, Amy adds a slight color treatment.

The intent is not decoration for decoration’s sake. The color helps signal, “We’ve finished that sequence, and now we’re moving into a different kind of content.”

A subtle background or color shift can be especially useful when your Rise lesson contains:

• A summary statement after a process
• A reflection prompt after instructional content
• A key takeaway after a list
• A transition from explanation to application

Just make sure the color supports readability and contrast. If the treatment makes text harder to read, it’s not helping the hierarchy, it’s adding friction.

7. Insert a Mighty Transition to mark a new moment#

To make the shift even clearer, Amy adds a Mighty Transition.

In the example, the transition visually separates the completed one-through-five section from the statement that follows. It acts like a design checkpoint: the learner has finished one chunk and is entering another.

1. Place your cursor where the content shifts.
2. Add a Mighty block.
3. Choose a Mighty Transition.
4. Adjust it as needed, or leave the default treatment if it already supports the design.

Transitions aren’t just for motion or visual flair. They help reinforce the organization of the lesson.

If you want to explore more of what Mighty adds inside Rise, check out the Mighty features page.

8. Downshift secondary image-and-text content#

Near the end of the walkthrough, Amy adjusts an Image and Text block. Her goal is to make it feel connected to the lesson, but less important than the primary content above it.

She experiments with several settings:

1. Centering the content.
2. Turning the quote off because it does not center the way she wants and falls off to the side.
3. Keeping the text smaller so it reads as secondary.
4. Adjusting the opacity on the dark overlay to improve readability.
5. Adding quote padding to create more breathing room around the content.
6. Increasing the text size slightly.
7. Adjusting line height where it helps, and returning it to default where it does not.

A hierarchy checklist for your next Rise lesson#

The next time a Rise lesson feels visually flat, ask yourself these questions:

• Does the main heading clearly outrank the subsection headings?
• Are related blocks closer together than unrelated blocks?
• Do bullets support the list, or are they stealing attention?
• Is there enough padding around major section shifts?
• Would a subtle color change clarify a new topic or moment?
• Would a Mighty Transition help mark a meaningful content break?
• Is secondary content visually quieter than primary content?

You do not need to redesign the whole course. Effective hierarchy can be achieved with a few simple but targeted changes.

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The takeaway#

Clear hierarchy helps learners move through a Rise course with less effort. Use Mighty to push beyond a few native Rise limits—larger text where it matters, tighter list controls, more intentional padding, and transitions that mark real content shifts.

Try it on one lesson first: pick the main heading, one list, and one section break. Those three adjustments alone can make the course feel clearer and more purposeful.