StoryMap Custom Background Textures or Images

[Jeremy_Z]

Howdy everyone,

Many organizations have requirements for certain elements in their documents, whether paper or digital, to have specific fonts, colors, or styles (let's just say themes shall we?). The Bureau of Land Management is no different, and wants us to use the contour theme and colors in everything we can. We have been trying to figure out a way to change the background and or border of our StoryMap pages with an image to mirror what we do on our websites and other public documents as seen here.
Hunting Unit Maps | Bureau of Land Management (blm.gov)

I've been trying to help some co workers at the Bureau of Land Management with this task but it seems we just don't have a way to do this yet, so I'm submitting it as a new IDEA.

We'd like the option to upload our own images for branding/style purposes to be repeated for the backgrounds on our storymap pages. This was also requested here...
https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-storymaps-ideas/textured-background-and-more-font-choices/idi-p...

But it was closed after 1/2 of the request was finished and a new IDEA was to be posted. I contacted that user and they haven't reposted yet (Thanks Sarah!) so I'm continuing on here.

Can we get this added please?

[OwenGeo]

@Jeremy_Z. Thanks for submitting this idea and providing an example!

Could you clarify something for us about your idea? In the example, there is not only a background pattern, but also a different background color behind the text (in your example there is actually a tan background around the main content and then also white background areas around individual text blocks).

If we provided the ability to use an image as the entire background, that has a good chance of negatively affecting the readability of the text or appearance of transparent images that appear on top of the pattern. It might be possible to provide this as a "border" (as you mentioned) while still using the existing solid story background theme color immediately behind text blocks. Would that meet your needs? If so, we could have our designers review this idea for feasibility. Please let us know.

One other idea for you to explore that might mimic what you are looking to do would be to embed a story in your own web page that provides the background pattern border that you mentioned.

[OwenGeo]

@Jeremy_Z -- Another way to incorporate your contours into a StoryMap could be to use a custom separator image in your theme. Here's a story with a custom separator with typewriter images as an example: https://arcg.is/XKPaT. 

[Jeremy_Z]

Thanks for your quick reply OwenGeo.

I think the border would meet our needs well enough, and would look good, probably give more flexibility in the long run, but an option to have the entire background (say a image of sand dunes from overhead in a SM about deserts) is important as well. If text blocks can have their transparency changed or solid backgrounds set in them and text colors can be changed, it's on the SM builder/designer to make sure it's legible.

I understand where you are going with that and agree, sometimes we need to save us from ourselves.

The linked previous idea goes over it well, and I attached a copy of one of the contour backgrounds we'd like to use in the first post, it's the same one that's on our website. I only really linked to one of our websites so you could see the background we were talking about. I use so many things to make my screen dark (Dark Reader extension, Force Dark flags) that I haven't seen our bright pages in some time, so I can see why it wasn't as clear.

Here's a screenshot of our publications site that shows all of our documents and such for templates, they all have this similar look. 

Previously, when I was working for our Eastern States office, we were looking at building some official themes for the GLO Record of the Week site, but the theme customization wasn't around yet, now that it is, this is one of the last items many of us need (thanks for the font choices).

The separator idea is nice, and we have it in one of our templates right now in fact. We are looking for an entire background and or a border with it in there. The separator and border combo would be really good in my opinion.