36 Days of Type
36 Days of Type is an annual challenge where illustrators and designers create the 26 letters of the English alphabet and the 10 Arabic numerals. One glyph is posted each day to the creator’s Instagram account. The 10th Edition of 36 Days of Type ran from April 10, 2023 – May 15, 2023.
Learning bite-sized skills
I used the 36 Days of Type challenge as an opportunity to learn new skills in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe After Effects. I deliberated made each glyph different from the next in order to push myself to use new effects and techniques.
60 minutes (or less)
In addition to learning new skills, I wanted to challenge myself to create each glyph within 60 minutes. It was sometimes hard to quantify the time I spent sketching but when it came down to vectorizing my sketch and exporting the final animation I would set a timer.
Embracing imperfection
One of the biggest takeaways from this challenge was that learning After Effects is easy when it’s done one step at a time. I also learned to embrace the imperfection and use each glyph as an opportunity to play around with the software and see what comes of it.
Using a timer made me complete this project faster—and it also made me pick up on the inefficiencies in my workflow. Since compositions were iterated out 36 times, taking the time to learn how to structure them saved a lot of time in the long run.