Daily UI
Why and Why Not ?
As every designer at some point in his/her career, I dared to take the Daily UI challenge, and started designing some of my ideas into UI screens to develop my skill set as a UI Designer.
This led me to design some pretty cool stuff (scroll down to see) and few thoughts about the challenge itself.
Let me list down some Pros and Cons of it :
Pros :
- Commitment to create something for 100 days.
- A short break from long duration projects.
- Satisfaction of finishing something and sharing it.
- Connect to the tools, photoshop, illustrator and sketch everyday.
- If you are not from a visual background, helps you to find your style.
- Before starting, google it and look at all others’ work and try something new.
- Way to ideate and create something original out of most common screens.
- Way to satisfy that crazy designer’s hunger to do cool stuff everyday.
- Teaches you discipline and commitment if done right.
Cons :
- Doesn’t solve any problems.
- Not user centered, at all ! done for our own pleasure & advantage of being a designer.
- In search of creativity, random UI elements are designed, in most of the cases doesn’t serve the purpose of user interaction.
- Fails to imagine a bigger picture of the application.
- More like building separate pieces of the puzzle and moving on to another one.
- Little bit difficult to keep up with it everyday, which follows with guilt and embarrassment.
Being able to express ideas, thoughts in visuals is a wonderful thing, it can be any form, from silly cartoons to detailed 3D artwork.
It’s what keeps us connected to the child with crayons inside us. But we shouldn’t get carried away by it.
Daily UI could be one of examples of dribbalization of design.
I’m not denying it’s not inspiring, I myself depend on dribble/behance to get inspired.
Daily UI gives a immense satisfaction on completing every day’s task.
It helps you pick yourself up on a long day of design review. It takes us on a short trip to place where designers relax by creating something small yet delightful.
A metaphor to illustrate the point would be…
“ By designing different styles of windows, doors, tables, hallways, kitchen and lounge is not going to help to design a house. But it would help us to keep our minds open for all kinds of possible ways to solve a problem in future.”
Overall, everything comes down to our own perception about things in life.
I personally feel daily UI is a good thing unless it’s doing any harm to anyone. which clearly it isn’t. I would continue to create and learn and grow.
