D246 Influential Communication through Visual Design and Storytelling, catalog number COMM 1721, is the three-CU general education course on foundational visual design and storytelling techniques used to influence an audience and make a lasting impression. It is not an art class and it does not reward taste. It rewards decisions you can defend: this typeface for this reader, this sequence for this outcome, this image because the alternative would have said something you did not mean.
Design choices have to be defensible, not pretty
The first instinct in a visual course is to make something that looks good and hope the rubric agrees. That produces two outcomes, both bad. Students with design experience make something polished and lose aspects for not explaining any of it. Students without design experience make something plain, assume the plainness is the problem, and spend their remaining days on decoration rather than on the reasoning that was actually being scored.
The reliable posture is to treat every visual element as a claim. A large red number at the top of a layout claims that this figure is the most important thing here and that it is urgent. Three columns of equal width claim these things are peers. A photograph of one person claims this is about an individual rather than a system. If you can state the claim, you can defend the choice, and defending choices is what a foundational design course is checking.
Storytelling works the same way. A narrative is a sequence chosen to produce an effect. Opening with the outcome and working back creates one effect. Opening with a person and delaying the outcome creates another. Neither is correct in general. What the course wants is that you chose, knew why, and can say so.
A story spine that survives a rubric
Storytelling advice is usually vague enough to be useless when a submission is due. This spine is concrete and maps cleanly onto how influence-focused aspects are usually written.
Start with the audience and the shift: who is receiving this and what should be different in their head afterwards. Then the stake: what goes wrong if nothing changes, stated as a consequence to someone rather than as an abstraction. Then the turn: the evidence, moment or comparison that makes the change look possible. Then the ask: one action, named. Then the resonance: the single image, phrase or number you want them carrying tomorrow.
Five parts, and each maps onto a design decision. The stake usually earns the strongest visual contrast. The turn usually earns the data display. The ask usually earns the largest type on the final frame. Building the story first and designing to it is faster than designing first and retrofitting a narrative, which is how most students do it and why most students run out of time.
Reading the rubric into a production plan
Your Course of Study holds the rubric. The public catalog does not carry scoring detail, so open the course and count the scored aspects before opening any design tool. Each aspect is scored on its own three-point scale and a score of 2 in each is what passes the task. There is no averaging, so an impressive artifact with an unexplained rationale still comes back.
Visual tasks almost always have two halves: the artifact and the explanation. Budget them separately and build the explanation as you go rather than at the end, because the reasons for design decisions are much harder to reconstruct three days later than to note in the moment.
A worked word budget. Suppose the task pairs an artifact with an 800-word rationale covering five scored aspects. Take 60 words to open and 60 to close, leaving 680 across five aspects, or about 135 each. At 135 words per aspect the format that works is four sentences: the decision, the audience trait it serves, the effect intended, and the option rejected. Write those four for typography, colour, hierarchy, imagery and narrative sequence and the rationale is finished, complete and inside the count. Where a sixth aspect covers accessibility, take 25 words from each of the others rather than exceeding the range.
Keep a decision log while designing. One line per choice, written when you make it. The log turns into the rationale in about forty minutes, and it is the single biggest time saver in a visual course.
What goes into the artifact and the rationale
Where your directions set a format, follow it exactly. Where they leave the shape open, this division keeps both halves scoreable.
| Element | In the artifact | In the rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Hierarchy | One dominant element per frame, with a clear second and third | Why that element earns dominance for this audience |
| Typography | Two typefaces at most, with sizes that differ enough to read as levels | What the choice signals and what the rejected alternative would have signalled |
| Colour | A limited palette with one accent reserved for the thing that matters | Contrast checked, meaning of the accent stated, cultural reading considered |
| Imagery | Images that carry information rather than fill space | What the image asserts, and why that assertion is accurate |
| Data display | Chart type matched to the comparison being made | Why this chart and not another, and what it deliberately leaves out |
| Narrative order | The five-part spine, visible in the sequence of frames | The effect each position is intended to produce |
| Attribution | Credit lines for images and data on the frame that uses them | Full references in the style the directions name |
The attribution row is where visual submissions most often lose an aspect that has nothing to do with design. Images and data have owners. A credit line on the frame plus a full entry in the reference list handles it, and doing it while building is trivial while doing it afterwards means retracing every asset.
Sourcing assets and data without creating problems
- Use assets you are permitted to use, and record the licence terms when you download rather than later. Where the directions require it, state the licence in the rationale.
- Never redraw a chart from a source and present it as your own analysis. If the numbers are someone else's, the chart is a citation with axes.
- Check that your chart type matches the claim. Parts of a whole are not a line, change over time is not a pie, and a scale that starts above zero exaggerates a difference in a way an evaluator will name.
- Test colour contrast against a standard rather than by eye, and never let colour be the only channel carrying meaning.
- Write alternative text for every meaningful image. It costs a minute per asset and it is frequently a scored accessibility element.
- Keep the source file. If a return asks for one change, having the editable original is the difference between an hour and an evening.
One further habit separates strong work: state one thing your design deliberately does not do. Every visual decision suppresses something. Naming the suppression, and defending it, reads as design judgment rather than as decoration.
What Competent looks like here
WGU records work as Competent or Not Competent, without letter grades or an ordinary grade point average, and performance assessment work can be revised and resubmitted without penalty. A visual task that comes back usually needs a change measured in hours rather than days, provided you kept the source file and the decision log.
Submissions that pass on the first read tend to look like this:
- A named audience appears in the rationale and every choice is justified against it.
- The artifact has one obvious focal point per frame rather than three competing ones.
- The narrative has a stake and an ask, not just information arranged attractively.
- Every asset and every data point is attributed on the frame and in the references.
- Accessibility is handled rather than mentioned: contrast, alt text, heading order, and meaning not carried by colour alone.
Where your plan pairs this course with a proctored objective assessment, the boundary is absolute. Proctored assessments are yours to sit. We prepare with drills, worked examples and an honest readiness read, we do not sit or assist during an assessment, and we never ask for portal credentials.
Five mistakes that cost time in D246
- Designing before deciding the audience. Without a named reader, every choice is a preference, and preferences cannot be defended in a rationale.
- Filling the frame. White space is a design element that beginners treat as waste. Crowded layouts lose hierarchy aspects more often than plain ones lose interest.
- Using a template and explaining it as a choice. Templates are fine. Claiming credit for decisions the template made is where rationales fall apart under questioning.
- Confusing story with chronology. Listing what happened in order is a timeline. A story selects and sequences for effect.
- Leaving attribution and accessibility to the end. Both are quick during production and painful afterwards, and both are frequently scored.
How support works on this course
Send the rubric from your Course of Study and the task directions. What comes back is aspect-mapped: a story spine built for your audience, a design plan with each decision paired to its reason, a model rationale written in the four-sentence pattern, and attribution handled properly. You build or adapt the artifact itself, which keeps the creative work yours while removing the part that eats a week.
Terms at WGU are six months at a flat rate, so the thing that lowers cost per course is how many you close in a term. Visual courses are unusually vulnerable to time loss, because polishing has no natural end. A decision log and a fixed rationale format are what stop this one from consuming a month.
Questions students ask about D246
Is D246 the same as COMM 1721?
Do I need design experience to pass?
Can I use stock images and templates?
Visual task open and the rationale still blank?
Send the rubric and directions. You get a story spine, a decision-by-decision design plan and a model rationale, with attribution handled properly.
Where D246 sits in WGU's programs
The July 2026 catalog places this code in 11 current WGU programs. Open a program page for the complete standard path and term positions. The live Degree Plan remains authoritative after transfer credit, substitutions, and mentor planning.
The assessments, one by one
The public catalog does not publish this course's PA/OA identity or task count. WGU Tutors publishes at most one PA manual per course and only from a WGU-controlled public rubric. Until that source exists, PA help begins from the student's real Course of Study and OA support remains preparation only.