Standardize All Title Fonts

[wboozer]

I have discovered that the titles of the various items (be they pages, discussions, quizzes, assignments, etc...) use different sizes of fonts in the title fields, some additionally being emboldened while others are not.  Upon speaking with a Canvas help-desk technician, I was informed that changing the font in title fields is not possible for designers. To illustrate, I have attached a screenshot of four different items from a course I have written.  I have been very impressed with Canvas since my university began using it last year.  Of particular importance to my school, however, is presenting orderly and uniformly formatted courses to our students.  The discrepancies in the title fonts among the various items of the courses we teach, I'm afraid, look haphazard and do not reflect the professionalism we wish to encourage in our students' writings.  I would appreciate if you could standardize the fonts used in the title fields of each of the various items utilized in Canvas.  This will create a more polished product and support professors' efforts to encourage students to uniformly standardize the formatting of the documents they write, as well.

[James]

 @wboozer  

If standardizing font sizes is important to your school, then you can override Canvas' styling by applying a custom CSS file through the theme capability.

This affects all courses, which is why only a Canvas admin can do make this change. Perhaps that is why the Canvas help desk said it wasn't possible for designers. When designers work together with the Canvas Admin to create custom JavaScript and CSS, even more amazing things can happen that are not easily possible with the standard Canvas interface. There are several other places with inconsistencies in size and spacing -- most notably, the H3 heading keeps on having recurring issues.

This page from the Canvas Admin Guide explains how: How do I upload custom JavaScript and CSS files to an account? 

[wboozer]

Thanks for your reply James.  It is difficult for me to imagine any professional institution, educational or otherwise, for which standardization of font sizes--and styles--is not important.  Our IT professionals have been in touch with Canvas about this issue since I brought the concern to their attention, and I'm informed they were told by Canvas that the variation in font sizes and styles in title fields is beneficial to students in that it illustrates that one item is different from another (i.e. a forum is different from a quiz).  I'm afraid we are going to have to agree to disagree about this.  The students already know a forum, for example, is different from a quiz by simply looking at the item itself.  There is nothing inherent in the size and look of the title at the top of an item (i.e. a quiz, a forum, an assignment, etc...) that indicates anything in particular, nor am I aware of a key that clarifies what kind of item a particular font size and style signifies.  The problem is that as students move from one item to another in a course, they see titles at the tops of each item that inexplicably jump from one font size and style (bold or unbold) to another.  This kind of random formatting is something we, especially English teachers like myself, try to teach our students not to do.

[James]

I suspect the reason is more likely that development was compartmentalized. There was a team working on discussions, a team working on content pages, a team working on assignments, a team working on quizzes, etc. In other cases, what is semantically marked as a title doesn't always look like a title. This is something that an institution could take upon itself to change with the custom CSS.

I care a lot more about styling and semantically marking things up than most people at my institution. The styles that I use on my syllabi are standardized for all of my courses and I've been trying to get people to mark things up properly since about 2003 (only recently -- with the accessibility push -- have others started to get on board). However, I don't enforce that style on everything I produce. What I can easily do in WordPerfect is not so easily done in LaTeX or in some other package I use. Printed exams use a serif font and equations within Kahoot use the Computer font from LaTeX so that my variables are distinctive enough to tell apart. My Tableau graphs typically use the fonts available there and Minitab has its own fonts that I would never pick on my own. When our institution tried to enforce a style guide, they mostly limited it to the branding associated with the school logo and name. I don't know that they were forward thinking to realize the difficulty in enforcing a style for everything or narrowly focused on just the logo because people were abusing it at will.

One might legitimately feel that Canvas is a single product so it should look the same throughout. I typically come down on that side. However, as I looked at your screen shots, I asked myself -- which font size would I want standardized for all of them? I realized that I wouldn't want them the same.

Whichever one I picked would look strange unless all font sizes (not just the H1 font used for heading) were standardized as well. One of my peeves is that Canvas keeps on shrinking the font size to get more on the page -- then they decide they've gone too small and things get bigger -- but then they get smaller again.When I look at your screen shots, the main text appears to have at least two (if not three) different font sizes. Standardizing just the title doesn't make me get excited.

As to what would be necessary to have them all be the same size ... the discussion is bounded within the context of the question itself rather than being separate and above the question. If it were above the question, then it could be larger. I would suggest that of the four types of things there, the title is more important on the content page than the other three. In the other three, the title gets in the way of the content. It's probably personal preference ... perhaps I just like the large title on the content page since that's the way I'm identifying it. The other three types are things that require action (discussion, quiz, assignment).

[ProductPanda]

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