During one of our late night calls, Christina and I were discussing this viral video on competitive programming. It is a mind sport where contestants write computer programs to solve various puzzles. Judging is based on correctness and time spent, but also other factors like quality of code, memory usage, etc.

We wondered what the equivalent was for designers. How do you determine who's a better designer? By how well they round their rectangles, or speedrun through a design with Figma shortcuts?

We continued to entertain the absurdity of this idea, brainstorming ideas and quickly landed on a vision that we wanted to realize.

And so begins the era of competitive designing...

We had a lot of ideas, but eventually, we landed on this: given a random user interface or website design, you have X amount of minutes to memorize it, and Y amount of minutes to replicate it in Figma. Using image similarity programs, whoever's design matches the original's the closest wins.

This game is played with the help of a Figma plugin, which facilitates the entire gameplay loop and has a few nifty features, like setting up the playing area with templates and fetching random designs from an Are.na channel for players to replicate, to name a few. It's still a work-in-progress, but you can view the GitHub repo here. And you can read a more in-depth case study of it here.