June 25, 2020 2020 Design Month Recap and Winners!

This year we held our fourth edition of Design Month.  It was an exciting month for our members as there were fun challenges, Bracket Challenge Tournament, Wednesday Workshops, and lots of design month points to be offered for our challenges. However, this year, Design Month was different – we dedicated it to our beloved designer and friend gh3ablo, who passed away in March.

We would like to thank all the members who made this possible – admins and copilots who ran the fun challenges: adroc, jmpld40, hmehta, fajar.mln, idblack, chekpir, systic, luizrrodrigues, lunarkid, mahestro, PereViki, vlack, grv.ashu, quesks.

If you would like to have an overview of Design Month, you can check out this page. 

Design Month Points

During Design Month, all members participating in any fun challenge, Bracket Tournament, regular challenge, writing a Thrive or blog article or attending a Wednesday Workshop have earned design month points which have been added to a leaderboard. The first place winner on the leaderboard will win a trip to the next TCO, a Topcoder Prize Pack, a private hour with Adroc for personal design feedback and an interview for the blog and newsletter. The second place winner will receive a Topcoder prize pack, a one-year subscription to Adobe Creative Suite or Sketch and a one-hour private hangout with Adobe for personal design feedback. Third place will win a one-year subscription to Adobe Creative Suite or Sketch and a Topcoder prize pack. In addition to the main leaderboard we also had a newbie leaderboard, a newbie being any member who has never submitted to a design challenge.

Workshop Wednesdays

In our first Workshop Wednesday we talked about the Topcoder design community, the upcoming things for Design Month with a focus on the Design Review Board (DRB), and how it will affect the design challenges. The DRB’s goal is to improve the challenge process for both Topcoder customers and our community of designers by completing design reviews and providing constructive feedback for challenge submissions. In addition to this, the primary DRB person will also be a specification reviewer and the members will receive final feedback for their submissions, which will help them understand why they won or not in a challenge.

Our second Workshop Wednesday focused on a few of our Design Alumni, in particular: kristofferrouge, djnapier and oninkxronda. They shared stories of how they started with Topcoder, their best moments, how being a part of Topcoder helped them in their career, where they are now and more.

For our third Workshop Wednesday, adroc invited Namit Bhargava, the General manager for Digital Transformation at Wipro, to be our guest and talk about working with Topcoder. The designers had the chance to talk to him and ask about his experience and expectations of challenge delivered design. Namit, who has more than twenty-one years of experience as a sales and technology leader has talked about the importance of illustrating personas to map services.

On our fourth Workshop Wednesday, we had a recap of everything that happened during Design Month, what the fun challenges and prizes had been, as well as who won the two large challenges we ran: Jessie’s Design Month Dash Challenge and The Bracket Tournament.

Challenges

Some of the best design challenges that we ran during the Design Month were: Meme Fun Challenge Tribute to Gh3ablo, Jessie’s Design Month Dash Challenge and The Bracket Tournament.
Gh3ablo was well-known in the community for his fun memes he always used to make with the members. We’ve been running the Meme Challenge in his memory to see how other designers would apply the same technique to get fun results. You can see below some of our best memes:

aizenanhar

Golgaid

kharm

Jessie’s Design Month Dash Challenge was launched in its second edition. This was a super challenge with three rounds. Each round consisted of a number of challenges with more heats/groups, and each heat was given some random items to include in their design as well as a color scheme to be used, a theme and specific emojis. We had more than 150 members join the challenge, many judges who were recruited from other sides of Topcocder such as sales, development, marketing, etc., and all design copilots working on it. The results were awesome! For the final round, the members had to design a virtual arena page to present real-time competitions (development, design, data science, algorithm), which can be viewed by any Topcoder member and allow them to chat along with others in the room.

Congratulations to the winners of this challenge:

1^st place: oninkxronda

2^nd place: eriantoongko

3^rd place: adittjg

The Bracket Tournament was the other large challenge the members loved. It was based on the format we used at TCO19 finals. This tournament was a bracket-style single-elimination tournament. We had thirty-four designers qualifying in a Seeding Round for this tournament, which consisted of five rounds. It was a battle of one member against the other, and only the winner would advance. 

We were live during all the rounds using Zoom, you can see the recording here. Being live, it allowed the members to join and ask fast questions or open any other sort of constructive conversations. Cendhika joined due to curiosity and he ended up being our DJ for the tournament by sharing with us great ambient music which kept the atmosphere on point – thank you! 

We used an online tool to show the winners in real time for the entirety of the brackets as they advanced to keep things more engaging for the viewers. You can see the winners of each round here.

Each round lasted only thirty minutes and the members had to design one screen in mobile/tablet format for different UX problems such as: design a screen for a coffee shop to help them manage their orders and customers at the counter, design a translating application, or design an application to check the freshness of a fruit based on AI.

Round 4 designs:

For the championship round (5), the two finalists, rajeshrathod and yoki, had to design how they envision the Topcoder PACT system looking on mobile.

Congratulations to our champion yoki, who managed to defeat many of our great designers in his path: rajeshrathod, iamtong, starck1819995, djackmania and aizenanhar.

Overall, I was impressed by the top quality of the designs and their speed! They were asked to design only one screen in thirty minutes, but some designers created three to six unique screens with great UX too. It was also interesting to see how many different ideas the members came up with based on the requirements.

Each of these challenges brought many design points to our members, as well as the regular challenges and workshops, blog and thrive articles, etc. which added up for the Design Month Leaderboard. At this point, we are proud to finally announce the winners of Design Month: congratulations to:

1^st place : yoki
2^nd place: iamtong
3^rd place: starck181995

It truly warms our hearts to know that yoki, iamtong, and starck181995 have all decided to donate their design month earnings to the family of Gh3ablo.

Big congrats for the new submitter winners as well!

1^st place : arcnajib
2^nd place: Sir_Luis
3^rd place: ashrutarya

We hope you all enjoyed our content this month and found it useful. See you at Design Month 2021!