Thanks for posting a screen shot, @leslie_irvine . What kinds of questions do you have? Are you wanting to add some visual elements to your courses such as images, videos, etc. to enhance your courses so it's not just text? There are several links here in the Community website where people have provided great examples of course design...such as how to design an inviting course home page. If you could provide some details on what your concerns are, that would help in steering you to some great resources.
Second, I'm not seeing it on your screen shot, but I wonder if your local Canvas administrators have considered enabling Canvas Commons (it would show up as an icon named "Commons" on your left-hand side global navigation menu). Canvas Commons is a large repository of shared content from all kinds of Canvas customers from around the world that can be imported into your own course. The nice thing about Commons is that you can preview the content prior to importing it into your own course...so that you can get an idea of how others are designing content in their own course(s).
Next, I wanted to provide a couple links for you about the history of Instructure...and why they designed a simple interface that works for the majority of users. Please check out these resources I found:
I thought there'd be more on the Community website, too, but I'm less bothered by that.![](https://canvas.colorado.edu/courses/56232)
What kinds of resources were you hoping to find? There's all kinds of resources available here in the Community, so changes are fairly good that something might already be available that is of interest to you. If not, you can always ask a question (as you've done here), and people will respond to help out.
Again, I hope these resources will be of help. Keep the questions coming. Thanks Leslie...