By Global Digital Citizen Foundation

Seeing creativity and understanding in student design projects is the pride of every teacher; our students show such creative prowess in projects with real-world applications, and to make the most of this they need awesome digital tools to explore and work with.

These eight tech-infused design projects will allow your students to discover their artistic mojo. The tools are simple to use, fun to create with, and provide stunning visual results. Best of all, you can adapt them to a variety of different subjects and grade levels.

1. E-Magazine

This is a fun design project that allows students to share their interests. Magazine projects teach research, graphic design, and publishing skills and can be done as school and personal projects. This design project is also a good introduction to advanced e-book design techniques.

The Tool: Canva

The design opportunities with Canva are seemingly endless. The tool provides students with a professionally-designed template specifically for magazine creation. Students can upload their own images and customize with colors and text.

2. Digital Painting

Let students create an original artwork from scratch. Do them in art class, or recreate original works for other subjects like social studies or art history.

The Tool: SumoPaint

SumoPaint is an online image editor that’s fun and feature-packed; there’s no installation required, either. It’s both a photo editor and painting application that works within your browser.

3. Photo Essay

A text-based essay can be ordinary and dull. Having good visual references that are artfully displayed can make essays more fun to create. Students will have a blast incorporating images to compliment their text.

The Tool: Stampsy

Stampsy is an online tool for creating photo collages, vision boards, and lots more. Have students collect, organize and arrange their work here before transferring images into the correct places in their essays.

4. Logo Design

The humble logo is a design challenge like no other, requiring an artful eye and critical thinking in order to personify an organization’s values, services and mission. Sometimes this proces also requires writing the perfect slogan, adding another dimention to this fun classroom project.

Show students examples of classic logos and slogans for inspiration before getting started.

The Tool: LogoBreeze

LogoBreeze is a free online logo designer that’s fun and simple to use. Once students begin creating their logo, they’ll be amazed by the design choices—everything is fully customizable on their art board. The final product is an SVG (scalable vector graphic), which is then convertible to other shareable formats.

5. Fundraiser Brochure

Fundraising projects are always a hit with students. Turn the marketing of their fundraiser into a design project, but assigning them with the task of designing promotional materials. This includes newsletter, flyer, and brochure designs. They can either print them out or share them online to spread the word for their fundraising efforts.

The Tool: Lucidpress

Students can create engaging flyers, guides, newsletters, magazines, and more with Lucidpress. The drag-and-drop tool is perfect for collaboration and one-click social media sharing. Projects can be designed for either print or online viewing and there’s a wide range of tutorials to help you get started with your designs.

6. Poster

Poster design is all about impact. It’s text used with purpose, and visuals that inspire interest and action. There are many different purposes for poster designing, making this design project applicable for many subjects and grade levels.

Students can create posters to demonstrate understanding of an important historical event, to promote upcoming class field trips, or to share details from a recent school event.

The Tool: Posterini

Right out of the gate, Posterini shows off all the choices students have to create amazing designs; they’ll browse through the templates and immediately be inspired. Posterini has an excellent tutorials section, as well, allowing students to learn as they go.

7. Visual Learning Collage

This design project is sometimes called an interactive web poster, as well, and gives students a platform to display information about a subject in an engaging and visual way. It requires research and use of Information fluency, allowing students to work on a variety of skills at one time.

The Tool: Glogster

Glogster lets students create engaging educational content. They can add images, text and video to create interactive Glogs. Have them browse through the Glogopedia to see what kind of creativity is possible before getting started.

8. Cards & Scrapbooks

Scrapbooks and cards are great projects that can be both small- and large-scale. You can use them as a way for students to show understanding, like with flyers or web posters, or you can have students collect and display images related to an assigned or chosen topic.

The Tool: Smilebox

Smilebox allows students to design unique and artistic cards, scrapbooks, slideshows, collages, and more. This tool also lets them design and publish photo books, newsletters, and calendars. They can even create “quick-print” photo books that can be put together in minutes.

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