Design Plan Appendix
Planning Design for
Pressbooks
Design plans help formalize your ideas on what your book should look like as a whole and enable accessible design.
Below is a template for a potential design plan for your Pressbooks book. This design plan can also be downloaded as an interactive PDF.
Design Plan:
Learning Outcomes
- LO:
- LO:
- LO:
- LO:
- LO:
Designers
Point of Contact
Structure
Front Matter
- Introduction
- Authors [can alternatively go in the backmatter]
- Accessibility Statement
- Acknowledgments
Body Sections and Chapters
- Describe how the book is divided and structured, including any subsection types that may repeat in each section or chapter.
Back Matter
- Versioning page
Text
Writing Style and spelling
- Example: Written in the present tense in Canadian English
Citations
- Citation style:
- Placement of references:
Capitalization
- Black, Indigenous, and proper names should be capitalized first letter, except when an author uses lower-case for their name (e.g. bell hooks)
Visual and Aesthetic Considerations
List OpenTextbooks that look good. What do you like about the book?
- Example:
- Example
- Example
Cover page
- What do you want the cover page to look like?
Default Theme
- Which default theme have you selected?
Colour Palette
Include the HEX number. Quick link to Concordia’s Web palette. Colour palette generators we recommend include Adobe Colors and Coolors. Ensure that colour contrast is suited for accessibility. Colour contrast can be checked through online accessibility checkers and previewed through Adobe Colors.
Default Text
Fonts
- Default Heading font:
- Default Body font:
Headings
Describe the use of your header levels:
Ensure that font size is accessible and decreasing in size as the level of Heading descends. Headings should all be larger and visually distinct from the body. Sizes of the headers:
- H1:
- H2:
- H3:
- H4:
Body and Captions
- Default Body size:
- Default Caption size:
Images
- Estimate of number of images:
- Template for tracking alt-text:
- Example of what the image caption should look like:
- Are there decorative images (alt-text not required):
Textbox variations
When creating textboxes, consider using Pressbook’s existing tools in the Theme Options page within the Apperance tab.
Textbox variation 1
- Name:
- What is its function:
- What it looks like:
Textbox variation 2
- Name:
- What is its function:
- What it looks like:
Textbox variation 3
- Name:
- What is its function:
- What it looks like:
H5P
- Which interactive components would you be interested in exploring. What would be there pedagogical function in the book?
- What are your potential sources for H5P?
Navigation
- Colours:
- Font:
