One Word a Day – Between July and the end of December 2023, I drew one word each day: my personal word of the day.
Commitment Community
It’s often part of a challenge to share your daily results on social media and let others in on your process. That adds a layer of commitment and helps prevent getting stuck in perfectionism. A hundred days is a long time and tough days are part of the deal. In those slow, sticky phases, connecting with fellow creatives and your community can be just the motivation you need to keep going.
Some challenges offer daily prompts to guide your work, but I personally prefer daily creative challenges without them. One idea often sparks ten more and I’d rather follow that momentum than be tied to preset instructions.
One idea leads to ten more. It doesn’t matter if not every single one works out—the real value lies in the sum of experiences you gather along the way.
Process > Outcome
The impulse for my first daily challenge came from my colleague Francis Choquet. In a talk at the Berlin Letters Festival, he shared how a 100-day challenge not only refined his lettering skills but also contributed deeply to his personal growth. Starting with the excitement of day one, the paralyzing lack of ideas after three weeks, the struggle to get back on track after missing a few days, and finally the joy of completing all 100 days. His story sparked my curiosity.
Sure enough, as I drew lettering every day for 100 days and shared my sketches on Instagram, I experienced similar ups and downs. But above all, my way of working changed. My sketchbook became my most important companion. I began to understand that the challenge wasn’t about making a perfect drawing every day. What mattered was the sum of all experiences. And when you create 100 drawings, some of them will naturally turn out great.
If everything goes well, those daily half-hour sessions add up to a larger project: the alphabets from my first 100-day challenge became a book a year later—of course titled Alphabets.
Ideally, the daily half-hour sessions of a challenge add up to a larger project: the alphabets from my first 100-day challenge became my book Alphabets.
My Daily Challenges so far
- May 2019 – 100 Days of Lettering
Completed - December 2020 – 100 Days of Lettering
Focused on animation, stopped on day 23 - March 2022 – 100 Days of Patterns
Stopped after about 80 days - July 2023 – 30 Days of Lettering
Ended after roughly 180 days - July 2025 – 30 Days of Paper Cut Lettering
»30 Words About My Father«
Joy and Pain
Not every 100-day project goes as smoothly as my first challenge. In winter 2020, I planned to create a lettering animation every day for 100 days. Sounds great! But it was way too much. After 23 days, I gave up. I had underestimated how time-consuming animations are and didn’t master the technique well enough—this kind of insight is also a valuable outcome of a challenge.
Since then, I set more realistic rules for my daily challenges. And if I skip a day? No problem. The key is not to quit entirely but simply to add the missed day at the end. Rhythm matters more than perfection.
Over the course of 100 days, everything happens. Joy, excitement, inspiration, but also boredom, impatience, and frustration. Because ultimately, these challenges are about getting to know yourself better: What do I enjoy? What comes easily? When do I get bored, and when do I struggle? Knowing these things about myself makes it much easier to focus in the future on what truly brings me joy and flows naturally.
My mom would say, »But you don’t always get to do that!« True. But you can at least try.
A Word a Day – How 30 Days Turned Into 180
In July 2023, I started a 30-day challenge. Every evening, I drew one word that represented my day and made the letterforms match the meaning of the words.
Mostly, I solved this with free association, like the soft, relaxed shapes in chill or the dark, heavy feel of doubt. Sometimes, I linked word and image more literally, like the running R with flowing serif-hair in explore.
At first, I worked digitally but that quickly got too time-consuming. I was already busy with another project, and the daily challenge had become an elaborate form of procrastination. So I switched from finished digital drawings to small sketches in my sketchbook. Without any preliminary drawing, I just went straight in with a marker. Markers are great because I can’t erase, I have to work with whatever I manage to put on the paper.
When the 30 days were up, I simply kept going. The challenge became a nice reason to reflect on my day. After 180 days, on New Year’s, ideas ran dry and words started repeating. That’s when I knew: time to end the challenge.