a reflection on my 100 day project

I did it - I finished the 100 day project on Instagram,! I will admit, during the second half of the project I was skipping days here and there, so overall it took me more like 120-130 days or so to complete, but I did it!

I really enjoyed trying different styles and subject and I could definitely see the quality of my work improving as the days progressed - proving once again that it’s all about practice.

There were some quite tough days - days when I just couldn’t get inspired, and days when I felt like I was just throwing things together to ‘get it over with’ rather than enjoying the process of designing. During the second half of the challenge I thus decided I would rather skip days than try to design when I was feeling really uninspired and nothing was coming to me. While I do appreciate that the goal of the challenge was to produce consistently, sometimes I felt like I was emphasising quantity over quality. Something I learned during this project is that as a designer you need to strike your own individual balance between producing lots of work without being too precious about it, and recognising when an idea stands out as being a really good one and taking your time with it to produce something really good.

Posting each of my designs on Instagram also made the challenge more interesting - it was interesting to see which designs people responded to/liked the most as they were not necessarily the ones I would have chosen. However, when a design got lots of attention it seemed to change my perception of it as well. I don’t know whether all designers struggle to evaluate their own work and feel overly reliant on others’ opinions or if it is just me. I think I need to work on having a bit more confidence to know for myself what is “good” and what is not without outside input.

the top picks

So which ones were my favourites? It was tough to choose, but I’ve narrowed it down to my top 12 picks below. Interestingly, the floral designs seem to be winning out over the geometrics for this selection. However, as a lot of the designs I created were quick and unrefined, there is potential and room for improvement in the designs that I didn’t pick to be part of the top 12 as well.

100 days of patterns design project top picks

what’s next?

Part of the purpose of this project for me was to develop a more varied and extensive portfolio of pattern design work. As mentioned before, I’m working on moving my business away from selling products to selling prints, so this seemed like a good place to start. I am planning to go back to some of the designs I created and refine and improve them further, as when you have to do 100 you can’t really spend a lot of time perfecting each one, and then we will see where that takes me!

posted on 2019 / 10 / 26

newsletter sign-up

Be the first to hear about new design collections, any upcoming exhibitions and special offers.