30 Fluent Designs in 30 Days-ish!
Earlier today I was in a major funk. I was feeling lost, distracted, un-focused and frustrated with everything I have been working on lately. I felt defeated all day, late in the day though, I finally came to the conclusion that I needed to take on a challenge, a challenge I have never tried before…
Over the years I have seen other designers and even developers pushing themselves to design something new or build something new ever day for 30 days (edit: I’m doing 30 designs, but not within 30 days). I have always loved the idea but never actually tried it, so today I have announced that I will give it a shot.
I’m going to try to design 30 Apps in 30 days-ish, each design will be focused on using the new Fluent Design Language created by Microsoft. I have always been a big fan of Windows (which is odd since I’m a designer!), for some reason though it’s always made more sense to me than Mac OS. These days, the OS you use is almost an invisible barrier. Except for Sketch App!
Here is the original tweet I sent out today, as you can see I have had quite a bit of interest in my quest!
Here is my current plan:
- I’m going to aim to do 30 apps in 30 days, however I may extend this to 30 apps in 60 days so that I have time to blog about each new design and allows for a bit more polished designs plus I’m going to use software I’m not familiar with (see below). I’ll aim for 30 in 30 though.
- I’ll likely only design one “View”, I simply won’t have time to design an app in it’s entirety and not the purpose of the exercise.
- I’m not designing new apps from scratch, it’s more of a “re-design” with Fluent Elements and refinements. Not trying to re-invent the wheel.
- I am seeking suggestions of things to design, whether it be an existing app, or feature, or element of an app. I’ll evaluate all suggestions and pick the ones I like.
- I’m also using the opportunity to learn Adobe XD rather than use Photoshop, this will likely slow me down as well but will force me to learn a new and more modern tool.
- I have had some requests to show “Animations” as part of my experiment, I totally agree with this, but it’s something I have never actually done — so I will need to learn how to do this and could lead to needing more designs to actually animate against which equates to needing more than 24 hours to do it (we’ll see though)
- I will write a blog post for each concept design, so do subscribe to this blog to follow along!
- I’m doing this for fun, to learn and to connect with my online community, if it becomes too stressful and overwhelming I may need to make adjustments.
As a Windows 10 fan, I’m thrilled to finally have access to a unique and fresh design language provided through Fluent. The UI and UX possibilities are endless, between Acrylic, Animation, Light, Depth and Materials, we have an opportunity to create apps that are not only functional but now finally beautiful!
I have long said that to make Windows popular again, Microsoft needs to continue supporting “Developers, Developers, Developers” but also need to focus heavily on Designers! Development is awesome and critical, but it’s not sexy, it’s not visual to the average user or creative community. Fluent Design finally has the ability to attract designers from Apple and Google ecosystems and get them excited about Windows. I really hope to see even more support from Microsoft to entice designers to design for Windows!
Thanks for reading!
Micah
Connect with me to discuss your next design project: LinkedIn, Twitter
See what else I’m working on: http://www.krazier.com
