Blueprinting styles

[carmen_vallis1]

Hi there

Has anybody used Blueprint to template course designs and styles for teachers? Has it been flexible enough to meet design requirements? What's the good, the bad and the ugly? #coursedesign‌ #coursedesigner‌

[jflint1]

I haven't done this yet, but we are testing this next week! We just want to blueprint a few basics: a designed course homepage is a must, along with a designed course card, and then grade settings. We anticipate blueprinting and then disassociating so that faculty have full reign over other parts of their courses. Happy to post back here once we have completed our test if it sounds like it would be useful for you.

[carmen_vallis1]

That would be so appreciated, many thanks! 

[jflint1]

Hi Carmen, 

We tested a blueprint of a designed course homepage today and it worked great! All styles, jpgs, and embedded links blueprinted just fine. We also created a file of jpg banners that we're going to ask faculty to use on certain key areas, like assignments and discussions. We put those in a folder, and that, of course, blueprinted, too. 

I wouldn't say that there's a TON of flexibility with design on pages. Most of what we did was in the form of designed buttons and banners, and there were layout ideas that we needed to abandon. But in terms of pixels and style and all of that, it worked just fine. No holes that I can see.

Hope that gives you what you were looking for! Best of luck!

Jocelyn

[galedn]

Hi, Jocelyn! I'm about to start playing with blueprints as well. If I design a page with various buttons and links, do teachers still have the ability to then add content below that? Or is the entire page protected from editing?

[jflint1]

Hi Natalie, In our case, we didn't lock down content, so yes, the teachers can play with that design. I believe you can lock down all content if you want. 

[carmen_vallis1]

Thanks so much Jocelyn, really helpful... can I ask what layout ideas you needed to abandon? 

[jflint1]

I'm so sorry to have missed this, Carmen. I have been buried and haven't been checking the community!

We are finding that you can't create much in the WYSIWYG editor, so we have created some buttons and other design elements in InDesign or other such programs. Then, we paste them in. Other than the HTML, there aren't a lot of options for ensuring proper spacing. We had 5 key buttons that looked great on large screens, but we couldn't get the design to respond to smaller screens. So in the end, we ditched that and went to easy bar-shaped buttons that we could stack. Does that help at all?

[carmen_vallis1]

Thanks so much for replying in these *interesting* times! It seems like Blueprinting is a good idea in theory but not in practice