Learning designing comes with its set of frustrations. And that list begins with not knowing what you’re missing that makes it look off. Even excluding the aesthetic choice, veterans can spot these minor issues from miles away. It becomes an almost OCD-like ‘skill’ for them. And what better way to develop this sense of perfectionism than with some stress-relieving games?
ShapeType
A feature that seems as easy in tutorial videos as it is hard to execute is the Pen Tool. The site shape.method.ac lets you practise this tool on distorted letters to create one that best resembles its original typeface. Players will get a similarity percentage as well as an animation showing the Bézier curves that were off.
The Bézier Game
To further master the Bézier curves, another game can help. The site bezier.method.ac takes the players through a skippable tutorial round of basic shapes first to help them get acquainted with how the tool works. The game gets challenging, therefore being perfect for an inefficient novice.
KernType
As the name suggests, it tests your kerning (spacing letters) capabilities. More often than not, fonts themselves have inherent spacing issues for particular letters. The shape of a letter also has a lot to do with what negative space it creates with the one beside it in typography. The online game KernType (type.method.ac) allows its players to space letters of different typefaces and score their input on a scale of 100.
The Boolean Game
The Boolean operations – union, subtract, intersect, and difference – have vast potential to be morphed into any shape of one’s liking. How exactly the operations function or how the layers are to be sequenced is puzzling for the beginner. The game has specific stages for each of the operations, as well as 20 extra levels ranging from easy to advanced for the players to brainstorm and make complex shapes from a combination of Boolean operations.
Color Game
The color game (color.method.ac) is a great way to teach beginners how to choose contrasting colours from the colour wheel. It has stages for hue, saturation, complementary, analogous, triadic, and tetradic, each with 5 levels, giving a comprehensive idea of how to navigate the colour wheel. Another game that requires players to select between two sets of letter-to-background contrasts in increasingly difficult stages is called Colour Contrast by The Color Palette Studio (thecolorpalettestudio.com/pages/color-contrast-game).
It’s Centred That
This mini-game (supremo.co.uk/designers-eye/) has been designed specifically to trigger the designers’ OCD. The premise is simple – is the dot in the centre of the shape or not? The players can also challenge their friends or play a logo guessing game under the same site.
Pixactly
The game pixact.ly is a pixel game where the player has to draw a rectangle meeting the given pixel width and height requirements. Whether or not it adds value to the design process is debatable. But the snarky comments when the player fails by a huge margin make it an enjoyable break time game. The trial-and-error approach to beginning graphics designing can be time-consuming and tedious. A good grasp of these games can accelerate the process.