In 2023, coming out of the doldrums of the pandemic, I was rediscovering my love for type design. At the beginning of that year I dusted off an old type project, Peasy, and worked diligently to get it ready for release. I spent a lot of nights and weekends, and even though the later stages of “finishing” a font can be tedious, it was a great learning process.

Later that year, my dad, feeling lonely since my mom passed in 2022, said he might want to move to Korea to live in a Silvertown. This is the name they give to pricey senior apartments where they provide three meals a day, health and fitness facilities, various activities, and opportunities to socialize. While at first my brother and I were against it, we came around to the idea, and my dad ended up moving in November of last year. But when he first mentioned the possibility of returning to Korea, I decided I should start trying to learn Korean so I could help him if he were to move. I signed up for an online class with the SF Korean Center and got placed at the Intermediate 1 level.

As a Korean-American, I’ve often felt shame that I couldn’t speak Korean better. When we were little, my parents thought — like many other immigrant parents at the time — speaking English with us would help us succeed in this country. So the Korean I did know was from basic things I happened to pick up from my parents and five weeks of language study I did in Seoul after my freshman year of college. Starting in on learning Korean again after so many years, I quickly found myself getting drawn in — watching dramas, following Korean accounts, joining apps to chat with natives who want to improve their English, trying lots of methods to learn and improve. It has been a mix of fun and frustrating, knowing I’m improving but still feeling my language skills are poor. I know every sentence I say or write has a mistake or two in it. After a year and half of serious study, I can generally communicate what I want to say, but I’m a long way from fluent.

During this time, my time for type design has regrettably fallen away. While I’ve been curious what it would be like to design a Korean font, I haven’t looked into it seriously. But last month, a design professor I know, Yeohyun Ahn, reached out to invite me to show work in a group exhibition at the ISEA electronic art festival being held this May in Seoul. I replied with an immediate yes, but I had to think hard about what I could make for the show. I remembered an old interactive animated sketch I made, where letters of the alphabet could transition into each other by moving the negative space shapes, or “counters,” inside a rectangle container.

I wondered, could this work for the Korean alphabet, Hangul, too? Hangul is a phonetic writing system for the Korean language, invented by King Sejong in the 15th century to promote literacy among the Korean people. Prior to the creation of Hangul, Korean was written using thousands of Chinese characters that took years of schooling to learn, so only the noble class had the privilege of literacy.

In Hangul, consonants and vowel shapes are combined to form each syllable. In Korean typefaces, this involves a lot of inner adjustment to make each combined syllable feel balanced. Before I started looking at Korean type closely, I naively thought Korean might be easier to design than Latin. (No kerning pairs!) But it’s actually another beast altogether — like kerning in two dimensions.

With the sketch of the animating letters in mind, I set out to draw my first ever set of Hangul characters, using the same concept from the Latin — letting the negative space define the form of each letter.

My process has been to design these characters first in Robofont, export the paths with a Python script, then import them into Processing to manipulate them with code. Then, inspired by surprising overlaps between the two languages that have stuck out to me on my language learning journey, I have been creating some animations of Korean and English words, where the words transition between each other.

Here are some of the results so far. In this first animation, the morphing words ‘삶’ and ‘life’ are a metaphor for the flow of our everyday lives.

I was surprised by how the word for ‘stain,’ 얼룩, sounds like someone pointing it out (“oh, look”) in English.

In this animation, the words for ‘push’ and ‘pull’ in both languages make for a fun play on words. 밀다 means to push and 당기다 means to pull.

Finally, the everyday words ‘많이’ and ‘many’ sound very similar and mean almost the same thing.

The concept for this project is to explore unexpected connections between the two languages using custom letterforms that can transition from one writing system to the other. Working across and between these two languages has been a process of discovery.

I hope to make something that could only come from my unique vantage point as a type designer, creative coder, and Korean heritage language learner. It’s been a surprising twist, being able to combine my interest in type design and learning Korean in this new way.

🇰🇷 If you happen to be in Korea in 2025, my work will be shown (at high res and frame rate!) at Seoul Arts Center at the end of May and GMAP in Gwangju in July–August.

📸 I’ll be sharing more on the project installation on Instagram: follow me at @pcho and @typotopo.

Type, between two languages was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A collaboration between Koto and our internal team

Brilliant is a website and app for learning quantitative and technical skills. Our main topics are math, data, and computer science, including AI. We’re direct-to-consumer, and most of our customers are in their teens, twenties, and thirties.

What’s different about Brilliant is our method of learning by doing — there are no videos, and everything is interactive. You’re interacting with diagrams and data, and rearranging code. We focus on skills that are broadly applicable to any kind of knowledge work. And we design the learning specifically to improve your ability to think and reason from first principles.

Starting in the fall of 2023, our team set out to refresh our brand to be better aligned with our audience of young professionals. We engaged with Koto’s LA team on designing and developing a brand across all touchpoints that would read as modern, cohesive, and engaging.

Brilliant’s brand evolved over time to include a globe-like app icon, a light all-caps sans serif wordmark, an illustration style called PIX built from straight-edged line segments, and a goofy character named Blorb who encouraged you along your learning journey.

Brilliant’s new wordmark is composed of rounds and squared off corners, echoing the shapes of our illustration style. It’s bold, yet friendly, and works well at small sizes.

For typography, we chose two typefaces from Contrast Foundry, CoFo Robert for headers in marketing, and CoFo Sans for use across product. We worked with the kind folks at Contrast Foundry to create a slightly custom version of the sans for our use at Brilliant.

We landed on a lighter, brighter color palette and a new pear color spectrum for use across primary CTAs and streaks.

Introducing Koji

A key aspect of the brand that we didn’t expect at the outset was the need for a new mascot we could tie the brand around. We value fun, vitality, and levity as important for helping people reach their learning goals. We realized that we wanted a new mascot who could help lower the stakes for learners and act as a natural cheerleader to help motivate them.

Enter Koji, a lifelong learner with 13.7 billion years of experience. Koji is a sentient particle born from the Big Bang, and your guide to the Brilliant universe.

Many thanks to

Our friends at Koto: Phoebe Roberts, Deanna German, Jim Ward, Carolyn Rush, Zoe Schneider, Angela Yu, Wyatt Turner, and Dave Ladd

The creative team at Brilliant: Sue Khim, Cole Bolton, Peter Cho, Cody Bond, Juliana Chen, Habib Placencia, Zack Davenport, Jack Kovacich, Lawrence Wilson, Marisa Rafter, and Ji Sub Jeong

Even if they haven’t put too much thought into what goes into designing a new font, most people will be interested, because type, and letters, are interesting to so many of us.

As a youngster, I was fascinated by letters: calligraphy, swashes, and ornamentation; ambigrams, lettering that you can read upside-down, or upside-up; Letraset, dry-transfer type you could rub letter by letter to compose a flier or zine. I explored type and computation as a grad student and worked in the design field for many years, using type every day. My lifelong interest in type culminated in learning type design, and I’ve been developing my craft over the past few years. I launched my first typeface Peasy this summer.

Lately I’ve been thinking about letters in all their shapes and sizes and why they’re so fascinating to us.

Why letters draw us in

Letters have a talisman-like quality. They’re connected to childhood, these brightly colored blocks and magnets. You learn your letters and learn how to read and write over a formative period of your development. They’re ingrained into us at a really early age when we’re impressionable.

Humans are pattern-seeking machines. We seek to make sense of the world, and patterns help us learn and remember what’s important. In pre-historic times, this meant knowing which plants were good to eat and which would make you sick. In literate societies, pattern-seeking is what allows us to learn how to read and write. We teach these patterns to our children.

Typography is a system of patterns nested in patterns, nested in larger patterns.

Letters are made of shapes you can write with your hand — repeated straight and curved segments that join in specific patterns. You string letters together into words, then sentences, and paragraphs. Letters contain a whole universe of language that let you express ideas and tell stories: it’s magical.

Written language then allows you to broadcast your words out to many others through various technologies, from the printed book to the web. This ability to reach so many people is yet another kind of magic.

In Thinking with Type, Ellen Lupton writes: “Typography is what language looks like.” Typography is usually invisible. But the choice of typeface also conveys another layer of meaning that a reader may or may not notice — it’s a vibe or a feeling. The typeface can evoke an emotion.

We like letters because they contain many kinds of shapes and come in so many different shapes and sizes. They come from a long tradition of writing and tie us back to history. There are many kinds of scripts across time and languages. As we get better at seeing letters, we begin to recognize how the same letter can be expressed with a wide range of shapes.

For instance, all of the characters above are easily recognizable as the letter a.

But there are some mysterious rules to how our recognition of letters works. For instance, the two main lowercase roman ‘a’ shapes seem they might be connected to each other like this.

But if you try to make an a like these intermediate shapes, rarely would you be able to read these two shapes in isolation as an a — they look more like the lowercase d.

Rationalizing the alphabet

This XKCD comic deeply resonates with me as someone who designs letters. I agree with how the alphabet start out strong, how the dotted letters are friends, and how V through Z are 100% ‘haunted letters.’

When you design a typeface (like Peasy shown below), you’ll start with an idea, and the lowercase a through z, since those are the characters that get used the most. You often start with n & o as control characters, and a handful of letters you can use for the basic shapes.

A bunch of the round shapes are related to each other. The curves of the lowercase b, d, p, and q are often designed to match each other.

These letters all relate as well.

And these characters that contain diagonals are often your problem children. The lowercase s is often hard to get right too.

As you add more characters you can express more things with your type. Punctuation lets you convey emotions, asides, emphasis. Diacritic marks or accents are important for writing in languages that use the Latin alphabet other than English. Numbers and symbols, too: they all have meanings that are helpful in expanding what you can say with your type.

Type design is a paradox

The goal in type design is a paradox. You want to make letters as unified as possible while simultaneously making them as distinct from each other as possible. You’re making each letter the closest to the platonic ideal of what that letter looks like, while following the overall structure and rules you’ve set up for your typeface.

And in the background, you’re keeping in mind the history of type, the long tradition of typographic conventions that inform many things, like: what letters in that style are shaped like, where the thins and thicks go, and where serifs should appear.

Type is a complex system of nested patterns. We love seeing the complexity, even if we’re not always aware that it’s there.

Check out Typotopo.com to test drive Peasy or download a type specimen.

This post is based on part of my lecture at the MIT Media Lab last month as part of the Computational Typography lunch lecture series. The lecture recording is available on YouTube now:

Why are we so fascinated by letters? was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On becoming a type designer

As a kid, I remember first getting interested in typography when I got my first computer, a Mac Plus, in eighth grade. Many happy hours were spent in Hypercard and Aldus PageMaker as I made interactive slideshows and newsletters. I remember poring over the Adobe Font & Function magazine and begging my parents for the first release of Myriad, a Multiple Master font that came on multiple 3.5 inch diskettes. It was just so cool that you could dial a single font to any weight or width you needed for your design — that was the future!

I even had an early copy of Fontographer, though the horrible fonts I made as a teenager are thankfully gone now. After a career spent in many different types of design — motion graphics, product design, web design, branding, and exhibit design — I decided to try my hand at type design. In 2017, I joined the Type@Cooper West Extended program (now Type West), and I spent a year learning the ins and outs of type design theory, history, and practice.

When I decided to apply to type school, I was honestly worried that the act of moving points around the screen would feel tedious, and this thing I loved, type, would become tiresome. Thankfully, for me, the act of designing type is seriously Type 1 fun on the fun scale — super fun while you’re in the act of doing it. It keeps you wanting to come back for more. I had put type design away in 2020 when the pandemic hit, and when I reopened my font design software earlier this year (I use Glyphs), I was struck by how calming and meditative it is to get lost in type design. I highly recommend it.

The making of Peasy: original inspirations

This month I launched my first typeface, hopefully the first of many. It’s called Peasy, and it’s a low-contrast humanist sans type family that works well for setting long-form text. Peasy was my thesis project from my type program, and to be honest, the name came first.

The project started with a few original inspirations — one was making something “easy” — clean, easy-going, a font I would want to use myself. Another was the idea of modular, multi-color type. Here I explored ideas for stencil and multiple stroke inline styles.

Some drawings I made called for wide base forms that could serve as a skeleton for supporting a multi-line display style. This led to humanist shapes and angles, notch shapes, and low contrast between the thin and thick parts of the letterforms. The multi-line winding shapes ended up resembling the angled stroke of a broad-nib pen and lended itself to flared corner details.

Halfway through the program, the design ended up quite wide, since I was trying to accommodate a multi-line engraved style. Wide styles aren’t super practical for most applications and are rarely used in text settings. The place you find bold, extended width type most reliably is in decals: on kitchen appliances or the backs of cars.

By the end of my degree program, I had a light and heavy roman style, a light italic style, plus a stencil display concept that I’d like to return to at some point. For my presentation, I applied these styles to a fictional airline. Later, after graduating, I spent a few weeks on a heavy italic style to round out the masters, then took a break.

Back from the pandemic

Having put Peasy away for almost three years, I saw so many things I wanted to fix when I opened it back up. I wanted to make Peasy a typeface I’d be happy to use to set text, a face that looks great at text sizes and is highly readable. So much of readability is about spacing, achieving even color between the positive and negative shapes, including the white space between letters. My type teacher Frank Grießhammer would say that as long as even ugly letterforms are spaced well, you can read anything.

My focus was on making the type narrower in proportion overall, with more tightly set side bearings. I simplified the italics by removing the exit strokes that felt extraneous and led to worse spacing. I ironed out odd flares and pinched corners. In general I also worked on improving the drawing of the shapes and corrected inconsistencies and dark spots in the light and heavy weights.

A big part of the refinement was figuring out the contrast between thins and thicks, trying to make the contrast angle as consistent as possible, and walking the tight rope of just how much contrast to introduce.

I wanted Peasy to feel relaxed and organic, not fussy or contrived, so I also worked on the curvature and angle of ending strokes, having the cut angle following the curve. The rounds are a little off from perfect circles, and these curves appear in the dots on the i and j and in the punctuation, too.

A lot of time was spent expanding the character set quite a bit. I got into diacritics I had never even seen before and learned a lot in the process. Peasy got a set of small caps (a personal favorite), fractions, and both old style and lining figures. I also added alternate forms, some with a more primary school vibe — a, l, and y — as well as a two-story g for more formal text settings.

Launching a font

In a feedback session on Peasy where he gave me advice on the design, David Jonathan Ross said, this is all “type designer shit,” meaning the details we were discussing were things only other type designers would really notice. He said that getting people to use the font would teach you way more than perfecting the curves. His advice helped me gain the confidence to go ahead and release the typeface and see what people make with it.

A typeface design is thousands of micro decisions crossed with thousands of macro decisions, at a thousand different dimensions. At some point you have decide, it’s ready to ship, and you hope it connects with an audience, and they make things with it that surprise you. I’m hoping these reflections give you more insight into the thought process of a type designer. If you’re curious to learn more about Peasy or see it action, check it out at my site typotopo.com. You can also download test fonts to try Peasy out for free.

Also feel free to send me any feedback on Peasy and what you might like to see in a v2. I’ve started to think about how I’d like to expand the type family over time.

Peer into the mind of a type designer was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve been a professional designer for over twenty years, working across a wide range of media: UX/UI, motion, branding, web design, mobile apps, and creative coding. Most lately, I’ve been developing my font design practice. Design is a long journey of exploration and growth. You live through bouts of self-doubt and self-criticism but ideally, you also experience many moments of pride in the work you put out into the world. As a designer, you strive to create captivating work that reaches people and has impact.

I’ve been reflecting on how you can make your design work better, especially when you’re feeling stuck. While working on my first original font design, Peasy, I realized the same advice that works in my day job in product design is true in type design as well.

If you’re feeling stuck with your designs, here are three strategies you can call on to breathe new life into your creative work.

1. Time is a gift

When you work as a practicing designer, deadlines are tight, rounds of iteration are fast-paced, and time is a precious resource. However, don’t underestimate the value of stepping away from your work for a while and coming back to it later. What designer hasn’t had the experience of coming back to something you’re working on the next morning, and saying to yourself, “What was I thinking?”

When you put the work away for a time, sleep on it, and revisit your work again with fresh eyes, you get to experience it new again, and you notice things that you became blind to as you worked on it for an extended period. Flaws or missed opportunities for improvement become obvious to you when you see things anew. Time away is also a gift because the in-between time is when you do your best thinking. Some of my best ideas come to me when I’m in a state of transition and my mind is free to wander, problem solve, and make connections: showering, driving, walking, or falling asleep in bed.

I experienced “time away” to an extreme with my font project Peasy. It began as my thesis project when I was a student in the Type@Cooper West extended program in 2018, where I spent many nights and weekends learning the craft of type design and creating this sans serif typeface family. I put type design aside as the pandemic started and ended up taking a two-and-a-half year break from Peasy. When I cracked it open again, I saw so many things I wanted to change. Ideas I thought were quirky and fun originally became weird and clunky. I had so many “what was that about?” moments. But having so many things I wanted to fix and change motivated me to put in the work to make Peasy into a typeface I’m proud of and would want to use myself.

When you’re immersed in a project, sometimes the best thing you can do to propel the work forward is give yourself the gift of time. Try setting aside your work for a day or two. When you revisit it, you’ll be surprised at what you see when you see it with a fresh perspective.

2. Change your context

Digital designers use tools like Figma to create frames, duplicate them, and make variations. Just in the normal process of working on your designs, you’re often passing through many different contexts.

A part of the workflow that’s so natural you probably don’t even think about it is changing your magnification level— you’re constantly zooming into details of the design, zooming out to get a bird’s-eye view of a full flow. You work across different contexts in terms of levels of fidelity, from sketches and wireframes to hi-fi visual designs. Another way to change the context includes creating working prototypes to experience it much closer to how an actual user would. For mobile apps, seeing it on a phone or tablet lets you try it out with the same form factor, scale, and interactions (tapping, swiping, pinching) that an end user would.

Digital designers could benefit by reviewing their work in even more contexts. Seeing it projected on a big screen can magnify details you missed on your laptop. Similarly, watching others test drive your designs (user testing or play testing) helps you see it in a new light. These days it’s rare for UX/UI designers to print out their designs, but seeing them in physical space, pasted up on a wall, can reveal new insights, inconsistencies, and connections. Printing out the screen designs also makes them more visceral, and you can better judge if they “feel” right to you.

In type design, you’re also looking at your work in a lot of different contexts. Letters don’t exist in isolation, so you always have to look at your type designs in the context of words, headlines, or paragraphs. You want to look at the curves and shapes zoomed way in to look at the details, and zoomed out, so you can see how the positive and negative spaces work together and look at the overall “color” of the type. Your type design tools let you reverse glyphs like ‘S’ upside-down and mirrored, so you can check that your curves are balanced and not lop-sided in any direction.

You want to see your typeface in the context you intend it to be used. For Peasy, I spent a lot of time typesetting and reviewing book, magazine, or web page layouts at body text sizes. Printing out your proofs at high resolution is key. You want to see the type design is well-balanced and works across many different settings and contexts.

3. Call on friends

Your third lifeline is the “phone-a-friend.” Much of the practice of design is a solo event. You’re at your desk, staring at the screen, moving pixels or paths with your mouse. But design doesn’t have to be a solitary endeavor. You can reach out to friends and colleagues for feedback and critique. Ask them to walk through your designs and talk out loud about what they are seeing and thinking. Set up a time to “pair design” and jam on the designs in a collaborative tool like Figma. Outside perspectives can offer invaluable insights that you might have missed, identify weaknesses, and uncover areas for improvement.

I’ve found type designers to be a uniquely generous community. Many type designers I’ve met give their time freely to offer opinions and help others improve their craft. When working on Peasy, I got invaluable feedback (in the form of emailed suggestions, 1:1 Zoom sessions, and liberally marked-up PDFs) from a whole crew of friends and colleagues.

If you seek feedback, be open to both praise and constructive criticism. Try not to defend your designs too hard and listen to what others are trying to tell you. Feedback is a gift and a powerful tool for growth if you want it to be. I believe most people in your life are kind and want the best for you — try calling on friends, colleagues, or experts you respect to give you honest and open advice.

When your design work is leaving you feeling stuck, you can always call on these three lifelines: time, context, and feedback. Give yourself the opportunity to take a break so you can approach your work with fresh eyes, see your designs in different and unexpected contexts, or seek input from those you trust. By incorporating these practices into your creative process, you’ll improve your craft and elevate your design work to a new personal best.

Peter Cho is founder of Typotopo.com, a studio for font design and experimental typography. Learn more about his original typeface Peasy at this link.

How to ‘un-stuck’ your design work was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Learning something new takes trial and error. You make a hypothesis, then you discover if you were right or if your thinking was off. Learning is a give-and-take process, and it can be messy — you’re muddling through something new and often challenging. To learn, you need space to explore freely, you need to experiment, you need to be free to make mistakes, and you need to enjoy the journey. How might we design experiences online that encourage these important aspects of learning?

A “blueprint” for interactivity

At a startup called Inkling where I led design from 2009–15, we were focused on how we could help students learn better through a new textbook experience on the iPad. We believed we could use this powerful, page-sized, touch-screen tablet computer—a new medium at the time—to advance learning. Could we make your path personalized and self-directed? What are ways we could make it easier to search, cross-reference, and annotate? How could we make the experience of learning more social? And how could we make the content more multimedia and multi-modal?

We developed a library of interactive modules called “blueprints” that allowed users to explore a diagram through a specialized interaction. We had blueprints for guided tours that would slide and zoom across an image, showing a caption at each step. We invented a “slideline” blueprint that would cross-fade between images on a continuum. A “test yourself” had a mode where labels on a diagram were replaced with text bubbles you could reveal one at a time.

Blueprints were useful because they could be applied repeatably across content types. But relying on blueprints meant that the ways you could interact with content were limited. We never went deep on creating exercises, explorations, or quizzes where the interactivity was intertwined with the learning itself, allowing the user to, say, explore the relationship between supply and demand in market economics, or test real-world simulations in physics.

The Brilliant approach

This summer I met the team at Brilliant and learned more about their approach to teaching STEM online. Lessons on Brilliant are bite-sized and artfully illustrated. They explain topics across math, science, and engineering through fun characters and memorable scenarios. And importantly, when taking a course on Brilliant, you’re asked to engage at every step, through low-stakes quizzes to test knowledge as you go, interactive visual explanations that allow you to explore freely, and puzzles that challenge you to apply your knowledge in new contexts.

Interactive content on Brilliant comes in a wide range of shapes and sizes. For instance, this animated, explorable diagram from a geometry course helps you visualize the surface area of a 3D volume:

In this dynamic illustration from a course on scientific thinking, a learner can explore how much light passes through as they change the orientations of a series of polarized filters:

In this interactive exercise, the learner gets live feedback as they look for the solution to a logic puzzle:

Here’s an example of how a learner struggles their way through constructing a binary search algorithm with tailored feedback at each step:

And in this lesson, a learner plays with a real-time search engine of the Sherlock Holmes corpus to discover the answer:

When I was offered the opportunity to lead design and research at Brilliant, I jumped at the chance. As a designer, I can see the impact that rich interactivity has on learners, and I see the promise of a product experience that considers user motivation, lesson outcomes, and learner goals. It’s my chance to dive back into the world of online education and explore how we can use interactivity to its full potential. And I’ve been inspired by my colleagues to consider how important play can be in making learning come alive.

The Four Freedoms of Play

Most online learning today happens through video, on YouTube, and lecture-format platforms like Udemy, Teachable, or Khan Academy. But the best digital learning experiences draw inspiration from what MIT’s Scot Osterweil calls the Four Freedoms of Play: freedom to experiment, freedom to fail, freedom of identity, and freedom of effort. These freedoms describe the ways we can borrow from the world of games and use play to create engaging learning experiences that stick with you.

• Freedom to experiment means playing with a system, trying out variations, and seeing how a simulation behaves under different conditions. It means tinkering and exploring freely. Experimentation is how breakthroughs are made.
• Freedom to fail means you’re in a safe space. Failing doesn’t mean that you’re doing it wrong, it’s a sign that you’re trying and learning from your mistakes. The freedom to fail is especially important in STEM, where you do have right and wrong answers, but where so many people have been stigmatized by how performance on tests and assignments are graded in school. They come to believe they’re “bad” at science and math, when in fact working through failure states is an important part of how scientists, mathematicians, and engineers make progress in their day-to-day work.
• Freedom of identity means the choice to try on different roles and perspectives. In games of many types, in unstructured play, in improv, taking on different identities from your own helps unlock new ideas and modes of thinking. When learning STEM it could be as fundamental as, “I never thought I was good at this, but seeing it explained this way made it click for me.”
• Freedom of effort means trying as much or as little as you’d like and being able to slide back and forth as you go. You can choose to push until you find the answer on your own, or you can ask for hints or jump straight to the solution. Having this flexibility is an important aspect of play that gives you control over your learning path.

We can use the freedoms of play framework as inspiration as we create interactive experiences that teach math and science topics, helping us make learning environments that are more engaging and more effective.

I believe the future of learning online is interactive play. The best learning experiences online will draw from the four freedoms, tell you stories that keep you engaged, and surprise you with moments of delight. Learning online should not be a passive, sit-back experience, it should invite you to lean forward, ask questions, and challenge yourself.

Interested in working at Brilliant? We’re hiring for key roles in design, research, engineering, marketing, and content.

Have a question or want to reach out? I’m @pcho on Twitter and would love to hear from you.

Thanks to Zandra, Ben, Pontus, Habib, Alex, Sue, Silas, Blake, Eli, and the rest of the Brilliant team.

The key to learning math and science online is interactive play was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A look back at the first three months at YDays

We launched YDays in October: it’s a site where friends, colleagues, family members, and even strangers can draw together and explore unique prompts and drawing tools. Since then, we’ve seen thousands of people try it out. The new year is a natural time to look back, so we wanted to share three things we’ve learned about drawing from our community over the past few months.

🌻 [1] Even when the constraints seem limiting, people find ways to express themselves creatively.

In the YDays holiday community challenge, day 3 was a snowflake-making prompt. We heard from several people that it was their favorite drawing of the week. Even though the brush was limited in what you could do, we were surprised at how different the responses were, from more “snowflake” like:

To something more out there:

This constraints of the tool and the drawing prompt came together in our first community challenge as well. Day 2 asked everyone to come up with a sports-related drawing, but the brush only let you make alternating black-outlined shapes. Here are a selection of our favorites:

We were blown with the range of dynamic drawings — it’s as if the limitations of the tool were helpful in unlocking creativity. We continue to be impressed by how people can take these little doodles to unexpected places.

🌈 [2] Drawings are a way to get to know each other.

So much of the time we spend on our phones and computers, especially in the past year, is about consuming news and social media. The cycle of doom scrolling never ends! We’ve enjoyed playing YDays with new and old friends as a bit of an antidote — and it’s been a way to get to know each other better too.

It’s also been a treat to meet some of you through your drawings!

For instance, the holiday challenge asked you to draw something you always wanted as a kid, whether you got it or not. Some of you wanted a lovely cat or dog:

Or a game console:

Or something else entirely:

We’re excited about the potential to make new connections with each other by sharing our creations!

🎨 [3] Drawing is for kids of all ages

If you’re like a lot of people, you stopped drawing when you were a kid. Maybe you didn’t think of yourself as “artistic” any more, so you put your markers away. It’s been wonderful to hear from people who haven’t drawn in decades, rediscovering the joy in drawing through the puzzle-like brushes.

YDays has also been a way for different generations to play together — we’ve heard about moms, dads, kids, and grandparents all drawing together.

We believe that there’s value in taking a moment for yourself to discover and play and making something each day. It’s a time to relax and to get outside of yourself for just a few minutes in your day.

🎉 A new year

In 2021, we hope to foster a community of inspiring, generous, and supportive people who want to help each other be more creative. Are you on board? Here are some ways you can help out:

• Try out the YDays Daily Play. Starting today! Check it out on your YDays homepage.
• Follow us on Instagram: @ydays_
• Share your thoughts. Do you have a favorite drawing tool? One you hate? Ideas for making YDays better? Want to pitch us on where we should go next? Write us at: feedback@ydays.com.

Learning about drawing was originally published in YDays on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Like you, I’ve been spending months stuck inside, unable to see friends and loved ones freely outside of the Zoom boxes we’ve grown so tired of. We’re all craving novel ways to connect with each other. And maybe, like me, you’ve hoped to use this time to improve yourself in some way. Could we be more creative, practice new skills, or make things?

YDays was imagined as a response to these needs: it’s a way to connect with our friends or teammates, be delighted each day, and inspire one another. Each day of a five-day YDays challenge, you’ll get a different puzzle-like drawing tool to explore and simple prompt to respond to. You’ll discover what you can come up with and witness how we express our unique personalities through low-key but surprising little doodles.

Taking inspiration from Typecookers

A main influence for the idea behind YDays came from a Slack community of lettering artists and type designers I belong to. We have a channel for running challenges that we call typecookers, so named because the type we draw has to follow an auto-generated “recipe” for characteristics of the lettering. (The term originates from KABK, a type design school in Holland.)

Each week, we agree on a word, phrase, or theme and use a bot to generate the recipe that we all need to follow, characteristics like weight, width, stem construction, stroke endings, and lengths of ascenders and descenders. Submissions are due Sunday, and from morning until late evening, the creations trickle in to the channel. We chat about the designs, we vote our favorites, and then the winner gets to post them to Instagram. It’s part competition, part inspiration, but above all, it’s super fun.

For “makers” like us, creating things is what fuels us. We have a strong internal drive to make new things with our hands and see them in the world. But our urge to make things competes with our desire, especially now, to sit back and consume media instead — so it helps to have some external motivation. Our typecooker challenges on Slack are successful motivators because they combine two important factors: constraints and accountability. Constraints are great because they limit the field of exploration you are permitted to use and force you to exercise being creative with a limited palette of tools—constraints can often feel freeing! Accountability is helpful because you have a deadline and a community of friendly folks who are both counting on you and cheering you on. You don’t want to let them down.

How YDays works

When you create a five-day challenge on YDays and invite friends or coworkers, you get a different interactive drawing tool every day. The tools have unusual properties, so part of the fun is discovering what you can make. They impose unique constraints you’ve never seen before in a digital drawing program, and these limitations change every day. It’s a bit of a level playing field too since no one will be an “expert” at drawing with a novel tool.

By joining a challenge with friends or teammates, there’s a bit of accountability too. It’s no big deal if you happen to miss a day, but it’s most fun when everyone is contributing every day, so you can see how the others express themselves when given the same prompt and tool constraints.

Listening to users

Since we started testing with users in late September, we’ve had a few hundred people try out YDays. We’ve gotten a lot of useful feedback like: When I got to the challenge screen, I had no idea what to do next. This kind of feedback has been essential in making the experience better, and we know we’ve still got a ways to go.

We’ve also had the benefit of having designers as early users. They’ve offered such helpful observations and advice about onboarding and usability. They’ve shared friction points about the mindset of a new user, both around joining, or starting their first challenge. And they’ve asked great questions about the strategy for how users can stay engaged throughout a challenge and how they can keep building and growing over time.

But for the actual drawing activities, the feedback has been really positive —we’re hearing that discovering the drawing tool each day is the most fun part of it for many people. I think YDays can be enjoyable for people of all drawing abilities: both people who draw regularly as adults and those who haven’t drawn since they were a kid.

Most of all I’ve been blown away by what participants in YDays challenges have been coming up with. People continue to surprise me with their drawings. It leads me to believe that while constrained, the creative possibilities of each tool is still a limitless space.

Some quotes we’ve heard from early users:

I’m having a lot of fun! And it’s nice to see that even as a s**t drawer I can get somewhere and it’s humbling to see what others can do…
—Jordan

Once my slow gears kicked in, I LOVED it. I learned to wait for inspiration until I saw the tool. And each day I was excited to see what the new tool would be.
—Amy

Loved this whole thing! It was exciting every day to sit down and do a low key doodle. Also loved seeing the creativity of other people and being surprised every day by their results and by the new challenge. It was time-boxed, so I didn’t worry about running out of steam.
—Shannon

My personal journey as a maker

In August 2020, a layoff from work led me to devote my full time to this passion project. I recruited a couple friends to join me part time in helping get the project off the ground and into your hands. Over the past couple months, I’ve gotten to dust off my coding skills in React and JavaScript, learn more about the capabilities and limitations of Firebase, and practice my skills in UX, UI, user research, usability testing, and branding with quick iteration loops with users.

The most fun part for me has been exercising my creative coding skills (using p5.js) to come up with unexpected drawing tools. For me, a good drawing tool in YDays is one that feels like a fun toy to play with, feels natural to use, doesn’t include any distracting interface elements or instructions on how to use it, and allows a novice to create something that looks cool, all while still supporting a wide range of creative expression. And bonus points if it has animation built into it.

As a designer-turned-design-leader, it has been a fun and rewarding experience to try my hand at making things again. What a rush it is to hear feedback on something that’s broken in the user flow, push an update, and see it go live. Or to invent a new drawing tool, put it out in the world, then see the amazing things people I don’t know are able to come up with using it. I’m excited to bring YDays into the world, and I’m even more excited to see what you will do with it.

Give YDays a try, and let us know your thoughts:

• Sign up at ydays.com and start a challenge with friends or teammates.
• What’s confusing to you? How could YDays be improved? What else should we build? Leave a reply, or write us to let us know what you think: feedback@ydays.com.

The Why Behind YDays was originally published in YDays on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.