Democratizing design education with Sharpen
The future of Sharpen.design, our design challenge generator
Two and a half years ago, I showed my friend Anthony a small side-project I had been tinkering on. It was a fairly sparse page with a single button that, when clicked, would generate a new, simple design prompt. It was the very first alpha version of Sharpen.design.
We didn’t expect much when we first posted it online, but to our surprise that little side-project grew into a resource used by designers around the world. From students at the Rhode Island School of Design and Stanford University, to managers at leading tech companies like Google, tens of thousands of designers have used Sharpen to find prompts to practice with.
This is the story of how we got to that point, and where we’re heading next.
Our roots
Anthony and I are both self-taught designers. Over the years, we learned that the most efficient, principled way to practice design is designing a ton of stuff; not reading opinion pieces or overthinking fictional briefs that lack the context and constraints of real client work. If our experience in the industry has taught us anything, it’s that being quick on your feet outpaces designing in a vacuum every time. In other words:
Refining your craft isn’t about reading more articles — it’s about getting more reps in. When designers ask me how to practice outside of work, Sharpen.design is the first place I send them.
— Ben Huggins, Head of Design at Humu
As we honed our craft and started mentoring others, we were frequently met with a recurring question: “how do you decide what to design as practice?”
My advice was always to write a bunch of client names and design tasks on slips of paper, mix them up, and then draw one from each pile to create a design prompt. Although that method carried me through my Google interviews and into a role on YouTube’s design team, I wanted to help more designers than just those who reached out: so I learned how to code 👨🏽💻
After a few hilariously buggy attempts at taking my practice method online, I sent a stable version to Anthony. One very short conversation later, we were teammates building a new kind of practice tool for designers.
The road ahead
We’re incredibly excited about all the open-sourcing of design curriculum that’s happening right now. The incredible designers at InVision, Google Design, Dribbble, and UXPin, to name a just few teams, have massively contributed to freely releasing principled, accessible, and structured literature on design in the last few years.
We aim to make Sharpen the best tool for practicing the principles and core skills showcased in the wealth of whitepapers and guides our friends across the industry have published 🙌🏽
We’re solidifying our commitment to that vision with our new logo — which we’re thrilled to announce today! 🎉
We’ve based the mark on two big aspects of why our practice method is so effective for becoming a better designer:
- Design principles ground and focus all practice efforts. You practice better when you have structure in your craft.
- Consistent practice, iteration, and evolution of your approach will help you find the right path, instead of insisting one way is the right way.
We’re building Sharpen to be the best way to practice design. Over the next few months, we’ll be evolving Sharpen with the feedback we’ve heard from STEM educators and design leaders from across the industry.
“As STEM programs become more prevalent in K-12 and Higher Ed institutions, educational tools that help build a culture of innovation become much more critical. Sharpen is one of those go-to tools educators can easily integrate to provide students with practical design challenges that help shape STEM-ready mindsets.”
— Ryne Anthony, Director of Innovation, Flux.
We’re building new ways to practice, new ways to navigate our growing list of 11.3 million design prompts, and new ways for early-stage designers to connect and learn from experienced professionals — while continuing to invest in our proven-effective core method.
We’re in it for the long haul, and we really want to give back to the industry that was so kind to us when we were first learning design 🎉
Are you a STEM educator looking to bring design thinking into the classroom? Or perhaps you teach design and you want to use Sharpen as a learning tool? Let us know! Write us at sharpen-design@vaultlabs.co, and tell us how we can better support you and your students.
