As part of the development of my skills for my final major project concept, to design and prototype an application and its branding around the theme of the Anthropocene and extinction, I am exploring the use of Adobe XD and continuing to undertake user interface (UI) design challenges each month. The Daily UI design challenge, discovered on Instagram, enables for the development of my previous challenge which helped me to gain skills in sketching wireframes for various application and desktop screens. This second daily creative challenge allows me to further the skills built previously but also allow me to build skills within Adobe XD. Software that will be key to the creation of the outcomes of the project.
Each day I am using Adobe XD to design a screen for either an application or web-based site. Each email for the design prompt is simple and vague which allows me as the creative practitioner to set my own boundaries for the challenges. In that regard, I have decided to alter the challenge slightly so that I can not only develop skills in using Adobe XD but also develop skills in product design thinking and to continue the development of a user-focused mindset, which the past creative challenge aided the birth of. Instead of designing full colour and animated screens each day, I am creating high-fidelity wireframes. The challenge runs for 100 days. The length of this challenge is four times longer than the previous. Although this could be hugely beneficial in the development of the user-focused mindset and skills around functionality design, it would be another two months roughly (at the time of writing) until I would use colour on the screens or begin to implement visual elements such as illustrations and animations. This makes me ask the question, do I split the challenge in half? For example, for the first fifty challenges, I will create high-fidelity wireframe layouts, for the second fifty, I will create full-colour flushed-out concept screens. This allows for experimentation of concepts from not only the user-focused mindset but also from a visual aesthetic too.
Regardless of the decision, I take with that topic, I will be building skills in fairly new software to my creative practice. In this blog, you can find my approaches to the daily challenges so far at the time of writing. I believe that the previous sketch challenge has helped me to work on this challenge differently. Always thinking about the user and the types of functionality the screen must show to the user at any given moment. These screen designs are then added to a basic social media template for use on Instagram and posted onto my university account. This allows for feedback from the design community and my own followers, giving me a wider perspective on my design and how to improve them. I feel this type of communication, Instagram in particular will be beneficial in the later stages of the project when I begin to finalise layout concepts and begin A/B testing. Using normal posts and Story posts to allow for voting and discussing the layouts/designs.
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