Personal Challenge
DailyUI Challenge
04Type
Personal Challenge
Role
UI Designer
Year
2023 - 2024
Platform
Mobile + Web
100 consecutive days of UI design. Each morning: a prompt. Each evening: a finished screen. No briefs, no clients, no safety net. Just a designer deciding what to make, how to make it, and why it should exist.
The challenge pushed me past surface-level aesthetics into the harder questions: what makes a screen feel trustworthy, what makes a flow feel inevitable, and what happens when you design something every single day without anyone waiting for it.
0
Days of Design
0+
Featured Projects
0
Platforms
0
Design Stages Each
Challenge
Designing every day without a safety net
I started the DailyUI Challenge to build a habit that client work couldn't give me: uninterrupted creative freedom. No stakeholders, no scope creep, no approval cycles. Just a prompt, Figma, and whatever I could make before the day ended. As someone who defaults to over-thinking, designing under self-imposed time constraints was genuinely uncomfortable at first and that discomfort was the point.
What Made It Hard
No brief: every constraint had to come from me
Designing in public as a natural introvert
Maintaining visual quality under daily time pressure
Avoiding stylistic repetition across 100 prompts
Knowing when to simplify vs. when to go further
What I Was Building
A consistent daily design habit from scratch
Confidence in sharing unpolished-in-progress work
Range across categories: apps, web, games, error pages
Visual language and personal design instincts
A portfolio of work that proved I could execute fast
"I am quite an introvert, so sharing my work publicly was a challenge in itself. But it turned out to be one of the most important things I did."Sofiia Kukhar on the DailyUI Challenge
Process
The same three stages, every day.
Prompt Analysis
Every design started with understanding the core goal, intended user, and functional context of the prompt. Even a 404 error page has a user, a job to do, and an opportunity to build (or break) trust.
Ideation + Wireframing
Layout compositions sketched in Figma with focus on usability before visual style. Hierarchy, spacing, and flow were established before any colour, typography, or illustration choices were made.
Visual Refinement
Colour palette, type system, and imagery selected for consistency with each mini-brand. Final screens refined against design principles: contrast ratios, visual weight, and reading flow always checked before closing the file.
Day 044 - Favorites Screen
Pulse
Workout App
A favorites screen for a workout app built to solve a real friction point: users who already know what works for them should never have to search. Pulse organises saved workouts by category with quick-access filters, a motivation streak indicator, and dense but scannable workout cards. The challenge was balancing information density with visual calm in a context where users are often short on time.
Onboarding Flow
Roomie Match
Roommate-Finding App
An onboarding flow for a roommate-finding app designed to build confidence, not just collect data. Most onboarding flows feel like form-filling. Roomie Match was designed to feel like a conversation: progressive disclosure reveals features one at a time, a visual progress indicator removes the sense of an endless process, and playful icons maintain warmth in what is otherwise a logistically anxious experience. The goal was to get users to their first match with as little friction as possible.
Fundraising Page
Crowdfunding
Animal Shelter Donation Page
A donation page for an animal shelter, where the design challenge was emotional: how do you motivate action without guilt? The page leads with warmth through photography and copy, then removes barriers with a clear goal visualisation, a countdown timer, and suggested donation amounts. Every element is oriented toward a single moment of decision. Progress bar placement, button hierarchy, and emotional image selection were all deliberate responses to the abandonment patterns common in fundraising UX.
404 Error Page
Cushion & Co.
Furniture Retailer
A 404 error page is often the most neglected screen in any product. For Cushion & Co., a fictional furniture brand, I treated the error as a brand moment instead. The chair-as-zero concept in the 404 lockup ties the error directly to the brand's product category, making an otherwise frustrating dead end feel intentional and characterful. Navigation recovery options and a support CTA ensure the page is also functional, not just clever.
Reflection
What 100 days actually taught me
The most important outcomes of the DailyUI Challenge weren't visible on screen. They were habits, instincts, and a different relationship with the act of sharing work in public.
Habit beats talent
Designing every day, even badly, develops instincts that no amount of studying can replicate. By day 60, decisions that used to require deliberation, like spacing, hierarchy, and contrast, had become reflexes. The challenge didn't make me a better designer by making me more creative. It made me faster at executing the right call under pressure.
Constraints are a gift
The daily time limit forced me to prioritise ruthlessly. I couldn't iterate forever. I had to decide what mattered most about each screen and execute that part well. That discipline, choosing one thing to do brilliantly rather than five things adequately, is the hardest and most useful skill in design work.
Sharing early builds confidence
Posting work publicly before it felt ready was uncomfortable every single time. But it taught me that the gap between 'good enough to share' and 'perfect' is mostly ego, not quality. Getting comfortable with imperfect-but-honest work made me a better collaborator and a more productive designer in every project that followed.
Range is underrated
Switching between a fitness app, an error page, a donation page, and an event listing forced me to think differently about audience, tone, and function each time. That range is something I now consider a core part of my design identity: the ability to step into a new context, understand its rules, and produce something that feels native to it.
Next project