The article features a graduate literacy teacher education course that compelled students to think in terms of design and multimodality. In an effort to innovate our own literacy teacher education work, we came together to devise a course that encouraged students to adopt a design lens to their thinking, planning, and assessing of literacy learning. We 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, we observed how eight teachers with varying degrees of comfort with multimodality moved into a design-oriented approach to literacy education. The article presents our research on design-oriented teacher education work, but the findings illuminate how the adoption and inhabiting of different mindsets and metalanguage can make a difference. (Contains 3 figures and 1 note.)