How I finished 2 X 100-day design challenge in 2020

And, you can do it too.

Challenge1 — 100DaysIllustrationChallenge

When I first thought about doing this, people said, What? Are you crazy? Perhaps, I was.

So, why did I even do this challenge and why did I do two design challenges together? By the start of the year 2020, I had finished about four courses in user research (UX) and user interface (UI) design, and I was practicing, but there was still a lot of ground to cover and I wasn’t able to practice design daily.

But, one thing was clear that in order to be better, I need more and more daily practice. While I was trying to come up with a plan of how to practice daily, I read about the 100-day challenge on Medium.

As Chandler Bing said, “ I want to go through the tunnel, to the other side.” So, I decided I will be the most committed person there ever was and I decided to give it a try. It seemed the best way to make sure I practice daily.

I tailor-made certain rules for the challenge, to get the best outcome for myself.

1. No matter what happens, the design needs to be every single day. Even if I get just 15 mins for the day, I still need to do it.
2. I need to post these designs somewhere on a public forum, so I am accountable and I have a library with all the information.
3. I want to strike a balance between Visual Design, UI, and UX. Coming from a psychological background, I was able to resonate with the UX process and the psychological principles behind it. Where I lacked was in Visual Design and UI. I wanted to make sure I improve myself here. This means I need to do two challenges at a time, one focused on UI and the other on Visual Design.

After the rules were decided, I made a list of things I needed to practice, so I am actually improving and not just making the same mistakes daily.

Challenge 1: 100-day Visual Design Challenge

The aim was to let creative juices flow, make myself draw, any topic or theme, no restrictions, and also have a little fun while trying to get more comfortable with the software. The illustration could be something that I saw that day or something that I struggled with during the learning process. To be able to post freely without second-guessing myself, I created an anonymous Instagram profile.

As a kid, I used to draw a lot, whatever would come to mind, I would just draw. But once I started taking school drawing lessons, I was made to feel inadequate and I stopped drawing. This led me to go back to my drawing book, just that the drawing book was digital.

Challenge 2–100DaysofUIChallenge

Challenge 2: 100-day User Experience interface

The main aim of this challenge is to get good at high-fidelity designs while also learning the design principles like hierarchy, white space, color, typography, etc. I divided this challenge further into two parts, first 50 days practicing web and app designs done by other amazing designers and the next 50 days trying to work on concept projects following the principles that I would have learned.

So, some lessons I learned during this time, which you can use too

1. It’s not easy: It’s not going to be easy, it’s going to be like work and very exhausting since you are trying to do something new. But in the end, when you look at how much you learned, you will be grateful that you started.
2. Start with a plan: Always better to start with a plan, so you can actually evaluate the progress you made. By day 40, I was completely exhausted and I felt I wasn’t progressing but knowing the plan, I knew I had to keep going and, in the end, I knew the things I was weak at and what to work on after the 100 days.
3. Your journey is different: When you start, your day 1 isn’t going to look like other people’s day 50. When I was looking at the work of other designers, it made me feel bad but then I reminded myself that they have put years to perfect themselves and I tried to see it as a benchmark.
4. Think of practice as a piggy bank: At first, every dollar will make you feel like you aren’t doing enough but by the end of 3 months you would have come much farther than you thought you could.
5. Always make realistic and achievable goals: I always saw this with clients while asking them to make goals, they could make such far-fetched goals that they would fail within two days and never try again. Being self-aware is very important, you need to know where you stand and make goals that are achievable and therefore push you to keep going.
6. Problems are going to keep coming: This year has been tough for all of us. I got sick, my laptop’s display got blurry and dark but the only way to keep going is to be disciplined and keep going. It takes more work on some days but if you can just spare 15 minutes to finish off your task, you would feel better at the end of the day.
7. It’s not about perfection: We look at the end results of a project, a weight loss transformation, or your favorite YouTuber's videos and it all seems so perfect. Well, they didn’t start out perfect. Their day 1 was probably as bad as yours, it’s just that nobody knows about it.
8. Accountability is essential: When you make these designs in secret, you are likely to think, so it’s just one day, no one will know, therefore, you need to post it somewhere on Instagram, dribble, Behance, your own blog.