What I learned from 30-days of practicing mobile designs

((sorry for the rambling, i basically recorded myself n transcribed it))

I did a challenge where I copied mobile designs.

NEW CHALLENGE:

I just finished a 30-day design challenge.. I'm starting another one.. >:)

So here it is:

🎨 30-day design challenge but…for this one focused on copying *mobile designs*!

Will (try) to have daily updates! https://t.co/X8zQOwBRuq
— peter! 🥷 (@pwang_szn) September 11, 2023

Reasons for Starting the Design Challenge

I think there’s two main reasons.

The first reason is I thought it would be cool to just challenge myself to learn something totally new.

I haven’t really studied design in university or read any books or taken any course on it. I just wanted to do something where I proved to myself that I could practice and get to the next level.

The second important reason is I think design is pretty important when building a product, especially now that AI models are so good and that they’re going to be advancing in the future.

I think one of the main things that will differentiate different products is going to be the design. So I think design is going to be a very valuable skill in the future.

Choosing Which Designs to Recreate

And then, how did I choose which company to recreate the designs? This one, a lot of it was just personal taste.

Whatever design I felt looked good, I would just copy it. I know taste is something you acquire over time and after you get a lot of exposure.

So I think my design taste may not be as nuanced as it will be in a few months or a few years of just a lot of design exposure. But a lot of it was just my current taste of what I thought looked good.

Most Difficult and Favorite Designs

The most difficult design to recreate was definitely Instagram.

I think Instagram has a lot of small details, which you don’t really notice when you’re using the app, but when you’re designing it, you do notice. I thought that one was the most difficult to design.

But my favorite one to create was probably the Airbnb one, just because I like the product and the design is very nice.

Accuracy of Recreated Designs

How closely was I able to match the original design? I think for most of them, it was pretty close.

One of the things that I do need to work on is probably the typography.

I’m not that great at choosing the right font size and getting the right spacing.

So that’s something I need to work on. And then I’m definitely going to be studying more about proportions and color theory. So those are going to be my main focus on how I can improve my design.

Benefits of the Design Challenge

Why do I think it helped?

So I think when you copy another design that a lot of other people have spent a lot of time trying to create, you kind of take a lot of the style and theory of why that design works.

So in a way, you’re avoiding a lot of the time that you would need to come up with a good design.

So I think when you copy someone else’s design, you do kind of learn a lot because a lot of people have taken a lot of their time to create that.

So you’re kind of just like taking parts and just putting that into your own design toolbox.

And I definitely saw improvements over the 30 days.

When I started, I would say I wasn’t that proficient at Figma. And I was kind of slow, but then I spent a lot of time trying to figure out Figma hotkeys.

And just practicing over 30 days, it sped up my entire flow.

So yeah, it’s kind of cliche, but practice does help make your process a lot faster.

Advice for Others

And then for anyone else that wants to do the same design challenge, I would say just pick 30 designs that you like and copy them and just do one every day.

So it’s very manageable and by the end of the 30 days, you’ll see a lot of improvement.