The concept of designing something every day sounds impossible but if you’ve never done a daily challenge before, it will be a whole new experience. But why should you do it? What’s the point? Turns out, there are a lot of benefits to completing a challenge of this scale.
1.) More Than Just A Trend
The concept of an everyday challenge isn’t new. There are a ton of variations of daily challenges in graphic design that take up interesting forms e.g. making a movie poster every day.
From A Movie Poster A Day By Peter Majarich
Some people do a challenge for 10 days, some challenge themselves for 20 and some for 100 days or more. Chetan Patil challenged himself by only using a calligraphy brush to challenge himself and as you can see, the results are fantastic.
From 10 Day portraits challenge by Chetan Patil
His challenge may be a little unorthodox but people currently studying or working in graphic design may know of 36 Days of Type, a movement on Instagram that encourages experimentation with lettering. Graphic designers have only been too eager to take up the challenge. And we even have a few projects on IndieFolio that showcase the work they did.
From 36 DaysofType by Maanvi Kapur
From 36 Days Of Type by Manav Dhiman
Adopting a challenge is great but if none of the challenges currently seen suits you, make your own challenge. E.g. try making a new version of a bullseye target every day for 5 days. It’s ok to start small and keep it simple.
2.) You Can Play To Your Strengths Or Work On Your Shortcomings
A challenge is meant for you to improve your skills. It doesn’t matter whether you’re giving an existing skill a workout or if you are trying your hand at something you’ve never done before.
A graphic design challenge is about perseverance and growth. Don’t worry about the results, remember that there’s always a lot of dirt to move aside before a gem is found.
3.) Out Of The Box Therapy
In the formal atmospheres a graphic designer studies and works in, there is an overabundance of what others demand of your craft.
A challenge gives you freedom to experiment and create because you select the rules and create your own goals.
It can also be therapeutic to think laterally and channel all your feelings into a design that challenges you then puts a smile on your face.
4.) Increases Your Observation For Inspiration
A lot of people who suffer with finding inspiration turn to their environment and suddenly, they find what they were looking for. From there, they create and challenge themselves.
From Sunday Sketches by Christoph Niemann
It’s as if what they needed was hiding in plain sight. A daily challenge with help you look around at the world in new ways. You will develop a new perspective on something old and familiar. Take the example of book cover designer, Chip Kidd who mentioned how he was stuck on a book design. The book was about a Japanese-American detective investigating a murder in an American city during the height of Pearl Harbour fame.
He decided to merge an image of Pearl Harbour and the city of Los Angeles together. 
His editor-in-chief didn’t like this take on it and said he could do better. From here, he was stuck on it and did not know how to visualise the central theme of the book. But, out of nowhere, he was suddenly inspired by a button he pressed every day he left from work.
This gave him what he needed to visually connect with the central theme. He submitted his new design and everybody liked it.
From Chip Kidd: The art of first impressions | YouTube
It’s perfectly fine to let your environment inspire you and help you complete your design challenge.
5.) Committing With Speed In Mind
A daily challenge is not supposed to take up all of your day. It is supposed to be something you can design in 15-30 minutes or even 5 minutes.
It can be a simple challenge like selecting colours that go together or snapping a picture of your desk at the end of the day. Or creating a graphic design with only 3 colours.
It will also give you an insight to how quickly you work while improving your overall speed of work.
6.) Gives You Space To Fail
You may not know it if you haven’t worked in the industry but graphic designers make mistakes. Some are obvious and probably have severe repercussions once discovered.
From 18 cringe-worthy Photoshop fails that should have never made it to the Internet | Mashable
Other times, it’s the smaller failures like forgetting to add a logo in a design or applying the wrong colour. Graphic designers feel like they need to keep their mistakes to a minimum in their professional lives but a daily challenge allows you space to be silly and ‘fail’ without facing any circumstances.
A daily challenge can be for more creative professionals than just graphic designers. Photographers, Illustrators, Content Writers, 3D Artists and more should challenge themselves. There are a lot of people out there who have done these challenges and they can tell you about the pros and cons of it for them.
We strongly suggest every creative person do at least one challenge every year. Once you’re done, we’d love to see it on IndieFolio and maybe it will be featured in a blog post like the other artists work you’ve seen above.
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