Thanks for the feedback. Yes, Connie and Cathy add great insights, Christy. And Kevin, appreciate the self-reflection. I talk about ‘business significance’ instead of ‘statistical significance’. While we want the best, we have to make priority judgments.

There is a balance of how much you put into the visual design (and especially if you’re doing something flashier), versus how much you put into the design.

You talked about the different skills for this, and I think it’s easier to get to that polished look if you have a team working together. That’s not the reality for a lot of folks though. I’ve been a one-person shop for much of my career, and I know many others are in the same situation. We have so many different skills to learn. Frankly, visual design isn’t something I focused on too much early in my career when I was learning about designing better experiences–and I don’t think my priorities were wrong.

I am grateful for Connie Malamed’s Visual Design Solutions book that finally made the principles make sense for me. I’ll never have award-winning visual design, but at least I now have a better idea how to design visuals for the purposes I’m trying to accomplish.

That maybe is the key: thinking about how to use visual communication to support your purposes. Poorly chosen clip art or cluttered design does distract from your purpose. Whether “dated” design distracts from your purpose is a harder argument to make. I lean towards agreeing with you that we could get into “unnecessary” polish, especially if we’re focusing too much on visuals without a solid foundation of design below.

This actually helped me not to worry about too much of the minutia since one can ALWAYS find something wrong. What I don’t like is courses that go out with typos, broken links, and so forth. THOSE I think reflect on the institution more than a design format that can be corrected later.

I’ve calmed down my inner online class OCD and we have actually improved! Thanks for highlighting this issue! I love the Jesse James Garrett diagram. I think it can easily be adapted for instructional designers!