How do you balance visual design with learning objectives?

I first opened up Photoshop in the Fall of 2004 so unfortunately a fair amount of my design is now automatic for me. That can make passing it along challenging as it feels very abstract, but the foundation of my development in graphic design since 2004 has largely come from spending time outside work learning about objective principles of graphic design and UX. And then making a concerted personal effort to factor those things in on my next work project.

I think some colleagues of mine over the years might go so far as to describe me having too minimalist a visual style, but I'm fine over-indexing on clarity, as I see it. Black text on white background predominantly. Color provides meaningful accents and signals. If a user is presented two buttons, one gray and one blue, the user is more inclined to consider the blue button as the default, so whenever I color buttons, I'm very deliberate in how they're styled.

Proximity suggests elements are together, which influences things like how closely I place multiple choice answers to their toggles. Text qualifying that the content has sound should be next to an animated indicator "showing" sound being played. If they're too far apart, the design can look disconnected and amateurish.

No one I know really talks about LxD, but I think about it constantly and consider it the holistic lens I design and develop through. It extends to interactive modules too since sometimes friction is desirable.

Here's a prototype I put out a couple months ago that I think illustrates some ideas. Dark blue and light orange are chromatic opposites and thus contrast well for people with vision deficiencies. I think out of all the color deficiencies, absence of blue and orange are the rarest so by having those as my theme, I increase the ability of people watching/playing the Trivia game in a classroom to distinguish their team's side from the other team's.

QoL changes in the Tic-Tac-Trivia game I think all add up too. For instance, if you start a game and hover your cursor over the tic-tac-toe board, the space will fill with a transparent shape of the team taking the turn. Does this directly support the recall of the quizzed information? No, but it reduces the likelihood the class forgets whose turn it is during a break or laugh or something, facilitating the underlying interaction of learning. To your point, great visual design gets people to do what they need to do.