Curious Realizer - 30 day challenges
Indulge your curiosity and stretch your skills with a short challenge that's not NaNoWriMo
As of Nov. 30 thousands of people around the world are near the point of nervous exhaustion and general collapse because they’ve been participating in the global thirty day challenge phenomenon known as NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). NaNoWriMo is a well known example of something called a 30 day challenge. The goal of a 30 day challenge is to undertake a project, or a repeated set of activities towards a single goal, for 30 full days. In the case of NaNoWriMo your task is to complete 50,000 words of a novel manuscript within 30 days, writing about 1,670 words per day.
There are many things you can do as a 30 day challenge: exercising, reading, practicing a musical instrument, origami, whatever you like. Sometimes people use 30 day challenges to help insert new habits into their daily lives. Others do them as a lark, something different to shake things up a bit.
I’ve been doing my own 30 day challenge, something that takes me out of my comfort zone because it involves graphic design. I was inspired by a recent blog post by
, creative guy extraordinaire, which talked about 30 day challenges. My challenge was to create a new logo (or at least part of a logo) for How About This, creating at least one design per day.My good H.A.T.T.E.R.1, I am a person of words, not drawings. I did a 30 day drawing challenge a few years ago but drawing and graphic design are not my core competencies. However, it’s good to try something different at least once per year to stimulate the “little grey cells”, as Poirot might have said.
I did my challenge in a notebook filled with square grid paper, which helps me immensely when trying to draw. I hope to get some assistance in turning these into a logo for the newsletter, as I’m not overly fond of this one:
This is kind of blah, really. I put two top hats in it to take up some space with some idea about symmetry but it feels inadequate to me.
So I’ve tried the challenge.
Here are six images that are OK or good enough to use as a starting point (the photo quality varies):
Image 1
Image 2
Image 3
Image 4
Image 5
Image 6
So, none of these are really great pieces of art, they are more about trying out ideas. Most of the other logos I created are actually much, much worse, a lot of playing with squiggly lines, dots, dashes and other stuff. But I do feel like the ideas and the drawings themselves did improve a bit during the challenge.
I feel like Images 3 and 4 might have some potential if given as raw material to someone who actually knows some graphic design principles and who has the tools to make a decent .PNG or something. And, of course, the overall image should have a top hat in it, somewhere.
Anyway, I feel a bit embarrassed showing you some logos that probably could have been made by a middle school student2, but part of this is show and tell, right?
The lesson here is this: you may do work that you feel (or know) is not great during a 30 day challenge, but doing the work is its own reward. Plus you may find the seeds of a better idea. And maybe you’ll encourage someone else to take their own tentative steps towards something new by showing your work, no matter what state it’s in.
Over to you: I was going to create a poll to see if readers had a particular favorite design but these are… not great. If you do want to leave some feedback in the comments then feel free! Otherwise, tell us about your own 30 day challenge experience in the comments!
P.S. My month 7 retrospective post will be published tomorrow, Dec. 1!
How About This Terribly Enthusiastic Reader
Today’s middle school student will have already created the .PNG file; I’m a technology laggard when it comes to this stuff.
In 2015 I took part in The 100 Day Project, and it's no exaggeration to say that it changed my life. I painted a portrait a day from the photos taken at Marina Abramovic's 2010 performance at MoMA, "The Artist is Present", and it kickstarted my art practice, 25 years after leaving art school. It took me to another place mentally and it showed me skills I didn't know I had. I keep *saying* I'm going to do another challenge someday—in fact when Austin Kleon wrote about it in October I dutifully printed out the 30 Day Challenge sheet he provided—but it still hasn't happened. It *is* a great thing to do though!
A terrific post, Mark! What a great challenge to have set yourself. I agree with you about the importance of process, and that 'doing the work is its own reward'. I'm sorry to report that I'm a swift giver-upper, and often say that I only like to DO the things I CAN do..... so your post is an excellent reminder to me to go ahead and actually WORK on stuff that I'm daunted by, rather than just throw my usual 'I CAN'T!' at it.
I love the ideas you've shown us! I think number 5 is my favourite. Have you thought about including a question mark?