"The Advantage of Embracing Discomfort"
Who do you want to become?
No one likes to be uncomfortable. Being comfortable is how we know we're safe, secure, and have nothing to worry about. In this zone, we relax, take our time, and stick with our routines we know work. But once you're safe, you stay in the same place.
Think of it as the game, capture the flag. You have an end goal you want to meet (the flag), but you have to take risks of being caught yourself in order to get it, or you'll never win. It's scary, but it's the greatest feeling when you take enough risks in order to get the flag for your team.
This is why we take risks. We know it's uncomfortable and it's not a move that we feel safe in, but once we reach those goals, we become SO much more than we were before.
So how does one go about doing this? It's not easy to just choose to be uncomfortable. We usually never want to put ourselves in that situation on purpose. It usually just happens to us and we figure it out as we go. However for me, I was reaching a point in my designing that wasn't progressing anymore. I was stuck in the same, comfortable rhythm, and I needed to find a way out of it. I decided it was time for a new project: but not a traditional project - something different this time.
The Project
My new project idea was called, “6-Days of Creating,” where I learned how to reverse-engineer, sketch, execute, and showcase my own original design for six days in a row, based off different professional designs each day. Let me break this down a bit further.
I started this project by coming up with an over-arching theme, and then searching for professional design styles that I could learn, understand, and use for my own original design. In my photography, I love taking photos of people and telling stories. This inspired me for my theme that I chose: book covers, and naturally, I wanted them all to be photo-based. I searched the internet for design styles that I liked and was interested in re-creating. After I had created a large collection of style inspiration, I narrowed them down to 6 different options.
My rules were: prep for two weeks before, then execute six different and original designs for six days in a row based on each of these styles, only having the 24-hour period to create for each project.
So, why this project?
Like I said before, I wanted to PUSH myself. I love photography, but I wanted to see if I could take it a step further. I wanted to do a project that would push my creativity, as well as my time management skills. Yes, I have 24 hours to complete each project, BUT, I'm still a full-time student, as well as a part-time employee for two jobs, and I need to sleep. That cuts down my 24 hours to very few hours. I know that life gets busy, and I wanted to push my skills while still having a packed schedule. How's that for uncomfortable?
Preparation
The first phase of this project was the preparation phase. I gave myself two weeks to prepare each design, so I knew exactly what I wanted to create when the time came to create for six days in a row. This preparation phase consisted of sketching six different sketchbooks - one for each day - with each sketchbook having at least 124 different sketches, as well as finding all the fonts, colors, mockups, and models for each day. The sketching would be a big help to nail down my ideas, and the additional prep would help save me time when it came to creating my designs. Another thing that I completed before I started sketching was coming up with ideas for each book cover, and knowing what stories I wanted to tell.
To help narrow down the best idea for my designs, I would go through five different phases for sketching in preparation: Exploration, Ideation, Iteration, Polishing, and Refinement.
I had a pretty good plan set up, and I was feeling confident in this project.
Well, I was, in theory.
Once I began my two weeks of sketching, I crashed. I spent nearly the first five days on a single sketchbook (remember, I had six to complete). Sketching would have been more helpful to me if I was focused more on illustration, but all of my projects were photo-based. I’m a photographer, and I love going out and capturing my ideas with photos - not sketches. Now this was a struggle for me, and a very unexpected struggle. Sketching should've been the easy part, right? Well, not for me. Sketching was taking me SO much longer than I was originally planning, and I hated it! I nearly gave up with the project, not thinking I’d be able to finish everything before the execution phase. I doubted any thought I had before of being able to complete this project. I was way over my head!
Or ... was I?
I stopped to take a moment to think again. Why was I doing this project? What was the purpose?
To be uncomfortable.
I remembered the whole purpose of me doing this project was to be uncomfortable so I could GROW. It’s easy to talk about being uncomfortable in theory. But when you’re actually there? It’s not fun!
I decided to take this opportunity, and run with it. I didn't realize it in the moment, but here I was, actually achieving what I wanted to achieve! Even if my designs didn’t turn out very good in the end, I was putting myself in an uncomfortable position, and I could either give up, or grow.
So, I started looking for new solutions to my sketching problem. I wouldn’t just become a genius artist overnight - but I could take photos! I started taking photos of myself in the poses I was trying to draw. That included my hand, my hair, different poses, and even different movements of a skirt. Since they were my photos, I could sketch right over them and adjust the drawing to fit my idea.
Slowly but surely, I became more familiar with drawing people. As I would fly through my sketchbooks, I would actually get better at sketching people on my own, with no reference. No, they most definitely weren’t perfect, but they were communicating the ideas that I needed them to for my projects, and that was the purpose of this preparation phase.
I was able to take some of these photos ideas in my head, and work them out to a final design to see what works, and what doesn’t. A lot of my original ideas actually changed after this sketching phase, and they helped me see a real final design that I could execute during the six days.
Finally, I had all of my designs planned out, as well as any additional preparation I could do before executing the designs. This consisted of finding models for all of my photos and scheduling times every day, finding fonts I wanted to use, mockups I wanted to use for my final designs, color palettes, and practicing some techniques I would be using in my final designs. When I finished this stage, I was really ready this time to execute my book covers.
Execution
Despite being ready, I was extremely nervous for this week. I knew I had everything planned out and ready, but I’m still a full-time student and employee, and my days were still full of work. I knew I would have to really manage my time well in order to stay on track for completing each project, start to finish, in the 24-hour window.
However, the project went smoother than I originally thought it would! Each project was very different and I still ran into plenty of problems throughout the week, but I was able to find solutions to those problems since I knew exactly what my final designs needed to look like.
On my very first day, I took photos early in the morning and worked on the project throughout the day whenever I had a break, but when it got to later that night, the photos were just not feeling right, and were not achieving the final look I wanted them to. Around 8:00pm that night, I ended up calling a friend and going into the same studio again that I used that morning to take new photos. Once I took those, everything worked smoothly, and I got the final product I wanted.
As I went through each day, I would reach out to family and friends for feedback on my book covers, and they would see things that I wouldn’t think of, since I had been looking at the project all day. Receiving daily feedback was a HUGE benefit to me for this project and helped me sort through all the nit-picky things that I would miss.
Overall, I was feeling great throughout this week. There were a lot of frustrating nights, but I was always able to complete the project each night and relax until the next day came. I obviously wasn’t perfect in this project; some projects varied a little from their original refined sketch, and I wasn’t amazing at my time management each day, but I’m really proud of each project and how they all turned out!
Conclusion
So, now that you’ve read all the way down here and have seen a snippet of my life, what do you gain from this case study? Maybe you want to try working on a new project of your own. Maybe you want to try this project out for yourself! Maybe you want to work on sketching more in your design process. Maybe you want to start tracking your time to be more productive. Maybe you want to eat a sandwich! (I sure do.)
Regardless of what you got out of it, I hope the biggest thing you got from this case study is to be okay with being uncomfortable. No matter how much you hate it! The only way we can grow and change is to get out of our normal and BE UNCOMFORTABLE. Naturally, we don’t like to be uncomfortable, so in order to be comfortable again, we’ll either give up, or push through to become a better and stronger version of yourself.
No matter what it is, you are SO capable of anything you put your mind to.
Now, what are you going to do?
Who do you want to become?
Final Projects
Thanks for reading my case study!! I would love to work with you! Feel free to reach out:
