This paper describes a graduate literacy teacher education course that compelled students to think in terms of design and multimodality. The authors saw this qualitative case study as a way to understand the interrelationships of learning processes, principles of design and multimodal texts, and how these might inform pedagogy. Building on years of work in the areas of multimodality and multiliteracies, the authors observed how eight teachers with varying degrees of comfort with multimodality moved into a design-oriented approach to literacy education.