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Writer's pictureChelsea Hans

Putting It All Together: Using Design Trends In Professional and eLearning Projects

Updated: Jan 13, 2019



We took a look at the design and eLearning Trends for 2019, although you may wonder how you can utilize these techniques in everyday projects? Let's take a look at a few trends and how to incorporate them.


1. Style: Mid-Century Modern


Taking inspiration from #4 Mid-Century Modern on The 10 Most Inspirational Graphic Design Trends for 2019, we start by gathering a few images for inspiration–also known as a mood board.



For this scenario, we are creating a design for an Employee Onboarding project. The character below will be the main subject and focal point of our design.



2. Color: Pantone Color of the Year Swatches


Moving to the color palette, Pantone includes suggested palettes that you can directly download and load into Adobe Illustrator. The two colors we will use are from the Under the Sea collection (Blue Depths 19-3940 and shades of Limpet Shell 13-4810).



Tip Vector shapes allow colors to easily be changed–which in return provides greater visual cohesion in your composition. For the image of the character, the pants were already a shade of dark blue. A minor color change was made by switching to Blue Depths 19-3940 from the color palette.



3. Finishing Touch: Brushes

For a final touch, we will further set the scene with an office background that–like the other image–has a flat design quality.





If we were to add our character straight into this image–it may detract from our focal point and add more noise to the composition. To soften the image for the background, we remove the fill color. Then make the lines white with a thin charcoal brush stroke. Finally, we lower the opacity of the image.




Read more on brush techniques in Shutterstock's article on 6 Creative Techniques to Instantly Transform Flat Designs.


Final Design




This entire design was created with time and budget in mind.


Graphics: Freepik (Premium $9 monthly or free with attribution)


 

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