This paper shows how to use design patterns for building educational multimedia applications. The first section summarizes design issues related to organizing the information, the organization of the interface, and implementation. Navigating through information is covered in the second section, including problems, motivations, and solutions, and relevance to EMS (Educational Multimedia Systems) related to navigational context and information factoring. The third section describes the organization of the interface in terms of problems, motivations, and solutions related to information-interaction decoupling, behavioral grouping, behavioral anticipation, and process feedback. It is concluded that, through the use of patterns, authors are able to identify common design problems and express solutions in a methodology-independent manner; the set of patterns also provides authors with a common language and access to the ideas behind successful EMS. Six figures present examples from current educational multimedia software. Contains 10 references. (DLS)