This paper presents a descriptive analysis of the challenges and rewards of revisualising and designing an innovative online space for a first-year Bachelor of Education Early Childhood Education course, Visual Arts in the Early Years. The perspectives offered are drawn from a design project involving collaboration between the course lecturer and learning designer. Central to the creation of this online learning space were the underpinning values and philosophy of the early childhood curriculum Te Whariki (Ministry of Education, 1996). With this as our guide, we set out to create a rich visual online learning experience that reflected the creative learning environments in early childhood education. The challenge was to transform a dynamic and fluid face-to-face teaching and learning context into an online mode. This engendered considerable rethinking not only of the content, but also the conceptual framework that informs best practice in e-learning. That is, the educational experience supported a conceptual framework that promoted social, cognitive and teaching presence (Garrison & Anderson, 2003). In order to capture the specific qualities of the course in the proposed design, it was essential to understand the underlying principles and values that informed the course. As Edwards, Gandini, and Forman (1998) assert, "the space has to be a sort of aquarium that mirrors the ideas, values, attitudes, and cultures of the people who live within it" (p. 177). It is argued that unless these beliefs are inherent in the design, the online learning environment that supports the depth of engagement and critical reflection by the learner is compromised.