100 days of UI
Learnings and Reflections from the daily UI challenge.
During the last few days of Mar 2020, the pandemic had caused each one of us to stay at home. I thought it was a perfect opportunity to start with the Daily UI challenge and work on my UI skills.
I started this challenge way back in 2016 but ended up acting on the first 3 prompts. I had realized that it required a significant investment of time that I couldn’t afford along with my master’s studies. But this year when I decided to do it again, I thought it’d be a good way to see how far I’ve come after working in the industry for more than 2 years.
I came across this article — 100 days of motion design, in which Tiantian Xu mentioned the internet’s 1% rule which states that
only 1% of the people actively create content, 9% edit content, and the rest 90% view content.
This acted as a motivation for me to be a creator rather than a consumer.
This video: How to trick your brain to do hard things showed me why I was not being productive enough. This was a real eye-opener and braced me for the challenge.
View the complete challenge at my Dribbble profile. You can see my transformation as a designer as I went through it.
Beginning of the challenge:
- Initially, it took a lot of mental effort and it was taking me close to 2 hours to complete 1 prompt as I’d sink myself into the research rabbit hole.
But the article How to do fast design exercises helped me get rid of that mental block.
- I wanted to make sure that I complimented this challenge with what I was doing at work. My company had switched to Adobe XD for all design purposes. So I did the challenge in XD which acted as a way for me to get familiar with it. If I was doing app design at work, I’d focus on producing more app designs for the challenge.
The messy middle (as Scott Belsky puts it)
- I was making too many decisions and I knew, a design system could be a good way to resolve that. I had used one at work but never created one from scratch. At this point, I came across this video by Pablo Stanley: Simple design system that proved to be quite useful.
- I created a framework: UI research can’t be avoided, to make sure I have a system to follow for coming up with designs in a quick way. The framework lays down the steps of coming up with a design when all you are looking at is a blank canvas. This reduced the time to think about what to do next.
I created a framework: UI research can’t be avoided, to make sure I have a system to follow for coming up with designs in a quick way.
- I also wanted to make sure that during the challenge, I am sharpening the knowledge blade as well. I read through the Refactoring UI book and the material design guidelines and both of them are a great resource.
- Sometimes life happens and I was not able to keep up with the challenge. A calendar reminder every morning made sure that I got around to doing it. I found out about the Eisenhower matrix to set priorities and it has really helped me to get work done.
I found out about the Eisenhower matrix to set priorities and it has really helped me to get work done.
Reflection
- Sometimes during the challenge, the prompt was too simple like a button UI or a menu UI. And so to add a bit of complexity to add I added some motion design to it. I found this video on the basics of animation by the JP design academy very useful.
- Doing this challenge warmed me up for design challenges later in the day at work. It even made me calmer about the design debates happening at work which earlier I’d take very seriously.
- One thing I could’ve done differently is set rules for myself to avoid burnout and give rewards at different parts of the challenge. I thought the author here did a great job of motivating themselves.
The whole experience has been rewarding and taught me the meaning of self-discipline and how to complete long term side projects. Honestly, I still couldn’t believe that I, a master procrastinator was able to finish it. But this is one accomplishment under my belt that I am super proud of and gave me a taste to do much harder things in the future.
Argument
I have heard a lot of arguments about whether you should or shouldn’t do the daily UI challenge.
Stop doing the Daily UI challenge: The biggest argument by the author here is Daily UI may help us advance UI skills like typography, hierarchy, color, layout, and so on, but we’re not focusing on the necessary skills to create a real product.
I did not come across this argument when I was beginning the challenge and for sure, this would’ve stopped me from even starting it. Steve Jobs learned calligraphy not knowing how it’d help him connect the dots. Daily UI worked the same way for me.
I am a product designer and these are the skills that it gave me:
- Discipline to do something long term as a side project
- A daily practice to think about design elements
- List of resources at my hand that I could use or suggest to others when needed
- Product design is not all about user journeys and needs, but also about what is the best UI to solve that particular need. Doing this challenge equipped me with an arsenal of different ways to solve a UI problem.
- Helped me to think on my feet. Many times during product design either due to a deadline or to make a point, you have to quickly come up with a design. This challenge helped me to not be scared of a blank canvas and to just put something together.
Another article I read shows this graph of how the number of people participating in Daily UI decreases drastically.
Looking at this graph makes me even more motivated to finish it. If it was easy, everyone would do it. Cliches aside, we should view this challenge as a design practice and as a creative outlet like coloring a book or warming up your day.
we should view this challenge as a design practice and as a creative outlet like coloring a book or warming up your day.
Resources
Here are the resources that I found useful throughout the challenge.
Images
Typeface resources:
Google fonts (Steve Shoger has a great video on how to choose fonts here)
Inspiration:
Colors:
Illustration libraries:
Undraw
OpenDoodles
Icons8
Illustrations.co
Freepik
Motion design resources:
Basics of motion design by JP design academy
Practical tips to great UI animation by Pablo Stanley
Bunch of resources
Hello! I am Jatin Gupta, a product designer based in Herndon, Virginia. Currently, I am designing for T-Mobile for business.
Check out these other articles by me and feel free to connect with me on Linkedin.
