What, Why, and Why Not

Adding banners on important pages in your Canvas course, such as beginning and end of module pages, can create visual interest and provide important visual cues valued by many learners. Banners should generally be thought of as decorative and usually will not contain vital information needed by every learner. Banners that are not thoughtfully created may be very large image files which can delay page loading times.

How

No special code is required to add banners - you just need to have a method for creating appropriately sized graphics. The graphics used for this DE Handbook are 1200x150 and were created using the online graphics program Canva (no relation to Canvas). A Google search for creating banners in PowerPoint will turn up lots of tips for ways you could use PowerPoint to make course graphics (the main tricks are setting a customized slide size and saving the file as a PNG or JPG file). As mentioned above, do be careful about creating graphics that are very large when saved. This typically happens when people start with a high-quality photograph when making their graphics. Make sure to set your banners as decorative, unless they really do contain important information, in which case you should be sure to provide appropriate alternate text.

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