May 31, 2019 Our 2019 Design Month Comes to a Close: Here’s the Recap!
Our third annual Design Month is coming to an end. What an exciting month this was! We had lots of fun challenges, cool blog articles, and useful Workshop Wednesdays in which we invited our challenge architects, admins, alumni, and others to workshops with designers.
We have to thank all the members who made this possible: our admins: adroc, HighDef, anthoneo, teevics, puchki, our bloggers: iqbalhood, PereViki, idblack, chekspir, mahestro, our copilots who ran the fun challenges: quesks, fajar.mln, grv.ashu, mahestro, PereViki, luizrrodrigues, and last but not least, our members eriantoongko and riopurba for the live Design Workshops they held.
For those of you who missed any of the great content, here’s a short recap:
Workshop Wednesdays
Design Month kicked off on May 1st with the first Workshop Wednesday. Adam and our challenge architects HighDef and anthoneo talked about what Topcoder Design is, how and where to start, and how to understand challenges.
In our second Workshop Wednesday we talked about what a designer can do at Topcoder and how they can evolve within or outside of the company. We invited alumni CoralBlue, Cendhika, DaraK to share their stories about how they started their Topcoder careers and where they are now. This workshop was a full house with nine people on the call. Adroc also explained TaaS, our new Talent as a Service, and detailed other roles we have within the community.
The third Workshop Wednesday was all about education. We invited fajar.mln and Topcoder Educator idblack to give advice on what things to pay attention to when submitting for challenges. Adam and the other challenge architects also talked about the importance of feedback in design challenges.
Iamtong and yoki were the designers invited to our fourth Workshop Wednesday. They talked about the favorite tools they use when designing, such as Adobe XD and Sketch, and gave everyone useful tips & tricks on how to use them.
The final Workshop Wednesday announced the winners of Jessie’s Design Month Dash challenge and showcased their designs. We also announced the TCO19 stage 3 trip winners. There were definitely lots of congratulations and a great atmosphere.
In addition to these, we also had two design workshops lead by eriantoongko, TCO17 finalist, and riopurba, TCO18 finalist. They showed us their design process and best practices.
Blog Articles
If you are a regular reader of the blog you saw it was filled with design articles. From interviews with our new challenge architect anthoneo, new design copilot vlack, and members with great achievements as ndondo_ to useful tips for Topcoder challenges such as how to prepare your files for submitting faster and how to format your submission for a challenge, inspiration sources for our designers, etc. It was all there. We also had articles on design topics such as best practices when creating a minimalistic design, how to design a brand identity, data visualization guides and mistakes that beginner designers often make. PereViki also told us about her Topcoder experience in the first year, the great experience of meeting Don Norman and why it is worth competing on Topcoder internal challenges. Last but not least, mahestro started a series about topcodering while travelling around the world with other designers.
Fun Challenges
One thing that was unique, and premiered this year, was the launch of Jessie’s Design Month Dash super challenge – an idea that came from our TCO Queen, Jessie. This challenge involved three rounds; each round included a number of challenges with more heats/groups, and each heat was given some random items to include in their design as well as a color scheme to be used. The prize for this challenge was a trip to TCO19 for the winner. The random items were always funny elements like a unicorn, broccoli, bumblebee, horse, fire, etc. We had more than 130 designers compete, many judges who were recruited from other sides of Topcoder like sales, development, etc., and almost all design copilots working on it. The final results were amazing! We looked at twenty-four submissions for our last round to design the Topcoder Educational Center. This ended with two first place winners – cendhika and ankit.passi, and a second place winner: oninkxronda, who all won a trip to TCO19! You can see their designs below:
1st place: cendhika
2nd place: ankit.passi
3rd place: oninkxronda
Other fun challenges that we ran were “Creative Art Work – Weird Tools Design Challenge”, in which we asked our designers to have fun creating design artwork using unusual design tools, “Topcoder Meme Fun Design Challenge” and “TCO20 Logo Design Challenge”.
We hope you all enjoyed our content this month and found it useful. See you at Design Month 2020!
DaraK
Guest Blogger
