The 36 Days of Type challenge is a daily art challenge that was designed to allow artists of all types to showcase their interpretation of the alphabet every April. I decided to partake for the first time ever during the second quarter of 2019 and it was exactly what I needed to get out of a monotonous creative rut. My theme for the #36daysoftype challenge was “Cities I’d Like to Visit” for letters A-Z and “Top 10 Favorite Cities” for numbers 0-9.

I’d say my graphic style typically gravitates to photorealism so the concept I came up with for this challenge was very fitting. It felt very authentic and unique to me, and I received a lot of positive feedback on it as the month progressed.

Executing daily designs and completing the entire challenge was rewarding for several reasons. First and foremost, I felt like I further developed my technical and storytelling skills, which is always a plus since the tools us designers use are always evolving and morphing. The amount of time us designers have to connect with our audiences gets smaller and smaller every day, too, and learning to communicate a theme effectively and appropriately (and only having 24 hours to do it) was also very rewarding. Lastly, connecting with amazing artists from around the world throughout the challenge was simply humbling. It was amazing to see how our themes and designs resonated with one another, and allowed us to deepen our connections within the design community.

Shoutout to the many talented photographers that contribute to Unsplash’s large directory of photography. Without your photographs my designs wouldn’t be possible. The same goes for everyone who contributes to Adobe Stock’s catalog.

Thank you to all the artists I got to connect with this year, and last but not least thank you to everyone who followed along. I really enjoyed your support and feedback.

Early inspirations for my design decisions can be found on this moodboard and more information about #36daysoftype can be found here. Until next year!