What I Wish I Knew Before The DailyUI Challenge
Cause I am a challenge junkie
Hi, I am Eleftheria, 26, and I admit I am a junkie for ~mostly coding ~ challenges.
🤔You think I am kidding, right?! Here is my list….
- 100DaysOfCode
- 100DaysOfFitness
- 100DaysOfYoutube
- 301DaysOfCode
- 30Days30Sites
- Javascript30
- DailyCssImages
- DailyUI
I decided to go to a noCodingRehub (for at least one year — no challenges for me) but before I do that… let’s talk about the DailyUI!
The DailyUI challenge
At 12-April-2019 I took part in the challenge of DailyUI. Some days ago I completed it. You can find the full list of my projects here.
Daily UI is a series of daily design challenges design inspiration and neat surprise rewards. — https://www.dailyui.co/
Although DailyUI is focused on UI, my approach was a bit difference… Instead of designing I wanted to code every day, for 100 days, all the themes this challenge had to offer me. So my primary goal was to code (front-end) whereas my secondary goal was to improve my design and time-management skills.
Let's meet the Designers
The next four quotes are from the DailyUI website.
“Daily UI is awesome because it gives me an opportunity to flex my creative muscle without a whole lot of limitation.” — James Hsu
“It gave me an opportunity to improve my time management while honing in on my interface motion design craft.”- Derek Torsani
“Love using the Daily UI challenge to experiment. The prompts are great to test out interactions, play with visual styles, etc.” — Kelsea Everett
“I was able to practice, research, discover, improve, experiment, play and, of course, work hard. Thank you Daily UI” — Francesco Paradiso
Let’s meet… me
😘What I liked:
- The freedom to design whatever I wanted, with any tool I wanted.
- The weekends (at least theoretically) are free and you only have to code/design on the week-days.
- You can share your progress on social media and other online platforms (although I couldn’t tag @DailyUI on twitter).
- Because a lot of people have completed the challenge, you can easily browse on google each day’s theme for inspiration (note that very rarely a theme might have changed).
- I believe I got a bit more creative than I used to be.
- I believe I got better at time-management.
- I connected with designers and coders from all around the globe.
- The challenge is free!
😞What I didn’t like:
- I would have expected to start from something small and then go to something bigger. But that’s not the case….
Day 1 is ‘Sign Up’, Day 2 is ‘Credit Card Checkout’, Day 83 is ‘Button’.
But in a sign-up form or in a checkout most probably you already have designed a button!
2. Some themes were pretty much the same…
Day 1 is ‘Sign Up’, Day 11 is ‘Error message in sign up’, Day 6 is ‘User Profile’, Day 26 is ‘Subscribe’, Day 82 is ‘Form’.
But a ‘Sign up’ or ‘Subscribe’ is a ‘form’… and ‘Error message in sign up’ is included at ‘Sign up’ and almost always ‘User Profile’ had the same style and the same information’ with the ‘Sign Up’/’Subscribe’.
3. Inconsistency in the work/time load.
Day 3 is ‘Landing Page’, Day 15 is ‘On/Off Switch’.
The amount of effort and time you need for these two projects is like day and night. (And Landing Page for day3 is kinda too much.)
4. I didn’t receive almost any ‘award’
Ok, this is not very important for me, as most of the ‘awards’ were meant to be for designers (not for coders) and I don’t think people do this challenge for the awards…
- But still, there were days, that in order to get the award you had to click on a link and that link didn’t work….
- Or the emails sometimes mention that you’ll get awards on days 25, 50, 75 but there wasn’t anything.
- And even if you had passed the days 25, 50, 70, the email doesn't change and still writes the same thing (25, 50, 70)….
5. Spelling mistakes
I am not good at spelling, I never was, and English is not my native language. I may do quite a few grammar mistakes but when I am about to send something formal I’ll double-check that at least I don't have any spelling mistakes (plus I use Grammarly which really helps!).
To be honest, I usually read the DailyUI emails fast and I wasn’t caught on the details, but then a lot of times I would copy+past the theme (maybe to write an article or for other reasons) and I would realize that some words are not correct…
6. Some days never reached my email
The emails for days 60 to 64 never came. For these specific days, I searched my ‘spams’ and my ‘deleted’ folders but with no luck.
I found the theme for these days by googling…
7. No explanations / Too generic themes / Probably outdated
One of my biggest concerns with DailyUI was that for some days I really didn’t know what to do! The first few days I was getting the ‘Design Hint’ which is basically 1–2 sentences of what you can design. Until day 35 I was getting the ‘Design Hint’, after that I only got it 7 times (plus the ‘Design Hint’ was written either as ‘Design Hint’ or as ‘Hint’, which means no consistency, but as a designer one fundamental core is consistency and as a challenge for designers I would have expected consistency!)
For days 44-Favourites, 56-Breadcrumbs, 63-Best of 2015 (and why 2015? is there a reason? and does this needs an update??) etc, I had no idea of what I was supposed to design.
8. Day 100 and beyond
On day 100 I had to redesign… DailyUI’s website…. (hint — I didn’t do that, but check out what I did instead)
So let’s go beyond day 100…
I thought I would get an award for day-100, spoiler alert, I didn’t.
I thought I would get something the days after day-100, spoiler alert, I didn’t.
As you can see in the image above there is this “Oh and check out something neat from our sponsor!”, after that quote I guess there should be an image or some text… anyway, there wasn’t, but I still clicked on the gray-square thing. The results can be seen below.
I haven’t received any other email from the DailyUI.
🙂These are my personal pros and cons. Will you take up the challenge of DailyUI?
Thanks for reading, I appreciate all your support, have an awesome day!
P.S.1 — This article is meant to be informative for people who are interested in the DailyUI challenge.
P.S.2 — These are my projects for the challenge.
Would you like to get me a coffee?!☕️ You can do that here → paypal.me/eleftheriabatsou
But If you can’t, that’s ok too 😍.
