This study investigated the modes, semiotic resources, and intersemiotic relationships present in the design of multimodal electronic texts. The participants comprised 10 women and 2 men, who were enrolled in a graduate-level course focused on multimodality and who used a virtual poster tool to respond to a classroom assignment. Content analysis of the virtual posters and constant comparison analysis of case narratives revealed three important findings. First, the web tool used to develop the virtual posters influenced the participants' responses by confining space, encouraging participants to shift away from words and rely upon video, images, and hyperlinks to convey information. Second, although participants incorporated numerous modes, many times the resources were not relevant to overall meaning, disrupting readers' comprehension of their responses. Third, given the impact of reading path on the comprehension of multimodal texts, participants who incorporated textual features to help guide their readers were more successful at creating unified multimodal responses. The authors discuss these findings in detail and discuss important lessons learned from the study. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)