Canva

Canva helps you create beautiful designs for your course. Use Canva's drag-and-drop feature and layouts to design gorgeous banners. There are templates you can adapt.

Although you can purchase an account, you can also create creative designs like the sample banners below.

Check your color contrast for readability!

Make sure the color of your text and background have enough color contrast AKA students can easily read the text. Download Colour Contrast Analyser to help. Make sure you meet "AA" standards to meet accessibility compliance. Check out the video How to use Colour Contrast Anlayser to learn how to use and read results.

Some guidance when creating images with Canva:

As mentioned, be mindful of color contrast. Ensure your text is readable against the color background.
Limit the amount of text on images. It is acceptable to have some text on images but try to add text directly on your Canvas content pages.
Read 3. Effective pictures for additional guidance to create engaging content.

Watch a video to learn how to create a course banner

Here's a video by Teaching & Learning Innovations CSU Channel Islands that shows you how to create a course banner in Canva.

Sample banners

Thin Decorative Banner 2000x80px

To avoid images taking the whole page and the amount of scrolling students need to reach your content, this thin decorative banner is just enough to add interest and spans the width of the page.

Canvas SP New.png

Module Decorative Banner 2500x300px

This decorative banner provides just enough space to add interesting images. This is a popular Canva banner size that can be used for Front Pages and Module Overview pages.

Paula Toto - Gene.png

Soundcloud Banner 2480x520px

In Canva, search for the design template "SoundCloud" to copy this banner's dimension.

This size is quite large and does take up much of the page space.