30 Day Creative Sprint 

From February 14th to March 15th I embarked on a 30 day creative sprint. I chose to manifest all of my daily challenges into something involving animation / motion / interaction. I also tried to theme all of my creations under an elevator pitch about who I am, what I do and why it matters.

Elevator Pitch

Hi I’m ivan and I’m a designer based in Richmond, VA. My focus is on innovative organizations whose mission is to make our world a more enjoyable place to live. I bring them into my process of making their visions come to life through experiences that bring delight with each and every interaction. I create these delightful interactions and experiences by focusing on the details of animation and design, All the while considering the end users or viewers every step of the way ensuring your message is communicated clearly.

From the very first week I noticed significant benefits of just getting into the routine of everyday making a thing. As well as seeing my animations becoming better and being able to do more with less time. It's also helped me get started in the day, having a small easily obtainable task to loosen my brain up for the day has really jump started my productivity. Getting into the routine of daily posting something to instagram has been an interesting experience. My account would get 10-30+ new followers every week, which was good and bad. Great that more people are seeing my stuff, but bad because it quickly became an unrealistic representation of how “good” my stuff is. Allowing instagram numbers to build me up is a dangerous game as it can just as quickly tear you down. Thats lead me to be more diligent to see instagram as just a place to document things, and if others happen to see it and like it then that's a great benefit but not to let that get to my head.

I was really surprised and also underwhelmed at the amount of students that didn’t take this seriously and missed out on a great opportunity to learn and improve themselves and their practice. However there were a handful of classmates that I was able to chat with and see that they were really learning a lot and I was surprised at the great conversations that emerged during reflective chats about the sprint. It was great to be able to identify with other students challenges and see how they have gotten through it or haven't and we were able to share helpful tips around challenges.

Sticking to my theme was the most difficult part of this process. As time went on that didn’t get easier but I grew more of an understanding of what I really did, and how that could be valuable to others. Another challenge was taking way too long on some days. Since animation can be very time consuming it became a good challenge to think of how can I get to the essence of what I’m trying to communicate or experiment with. That didn’t always happen, there were many days of 4-8 hours straight of pushing pixels and pulling bezier handles, like day 29. There were also a handful of days that what I ended up with was garbage, (like day 20, 27, and 28… and probably some others) as far as the end result, however those days were just as beneficial as every other day because during the process I was able to experiment and mess up which resulted in many great learning experiences.

I learned that sprints and daily practices can be very very beneficial. At the start of this I was a bit skeptical from past experiences and from other articles I’ve read about daily sprints not being all that helpful in the end. I really see how that can be the case If you don’t have a clear focus and goal in mind with the sprint. When it's just aimless it can be very bland and kinda a waste of time. I also started seeing the benefit of being able to have a longer term project. Working on something over several days to really focus on building skills of working on the details rather than the general idea. Now that the creative sprint is over I’ve been using that time to work on an animated story for my senior project. It's been helpful to break up the project into different experiments to test different animation styles and quickly get ideas out. This way of animating for me has been inspired by the quickness of the daily sprint and has been really helpful in moving my project forward.

I’m not sure I remember “work with the unexpected” being mentioned and as a result of that I did not really focus on that theme during my sprint…

Some of the big ways that I was able to relate the sprint with my elevator pitch was first by being transparent by recording a process video with each and every day’s animation. My goal is to always include my clients in my process. Process videos are something that I’ve always been suuuuper excited by ever since I had my first experience from DKNG and their process videos. They’re done so well and its mesmerizing to see something amazing come from nothing in a few minutes. It also speaks to my desire as a creative to alway be sharing what I know with others and to teach how I do things. Another way that I related to my pitch was through motion and interaction. I desire to bring delight with interactions and motion and during this Sprint I was able to try out new ways of doing just that.

This sprint was extremely beneficial to me. If nothing else I ended up with 30 pieces of work that I was able to use in a motion reel. Beyond that it showed me how a daily practice of my craft helps break out of ruts and progress in some way every day

Scroll down and Enjoy :)