Like any good trade, designing requires practice to keep your skills sharp. I like to periodically sharpen my skills by setting up small challenges with a handicap or goal in mind (example, design 5 poster designs, but use only 2 colors in each poster).

A few years ago, I attempted to practice my design speed by creating iPhone backgrounds of Pokémon. I posted 3 examples of Pokémon backgrounds on the website Reddit under the subreddit of r/pokemon. I asked the community to shout out random Pokémon that they would like to see as iPhone backgrounds and I would attempt to make them as fast as possible.

The largest obstacle of this test was not knowing which Pokémon would be requested and keeping up with the overwhelming number of requests. On average, each design took approximately eight minutes to complete.

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