Designers can work in a multitude of fields. They are the ones who form shapes into reality. They also play a critical role envisioning products made with safe materials that can be perpetually cycled, and eliminate the concept of “waste”. In order to make them produce sustainable art they need to learn and apply critical strategies by constantly challenging themselves every now and then. And that’s where Sharpen Design steps in.

So, we have interviewed the Co-Founders of Sharpen Design Arman Nobari and Anthony Gibson, to learn more about their site.

Can you tell us what Sharpen Design is? What services do you provide?

Arman: Sharpen.design generates challenging design prompts to get you out of your comfort zone. It’s meant to catch you off-guard and provide unique hypothetical scenarios to design yourself out of.

Anthony: It’s a great tool to practice and refine your skills if you are a designer, but also works as a great way for companies to develop interviews for designers. Once you’re done with your design challenge, send it to us on Twitter @sharpen_des
ign for a chance to be featured in our newsletter!

What inspired you to start Sharpen Design? What are the current goals that the company is focused on and how does your team work to support hitting those goals?

Arman: I used to use a similar method to practice for interviews in college. It wasn’t until recently, while chatting with a mentee, that I thought to build it into a site. After standing up the initial generator, I brought in Anthony and we built it into what’s live today.

Anthony: Once Arman showed me the prototype, my mind was racing with ideas for how it could be structured within a browser. We spent a Saturday together to get it all put together and then released it to the world. Since then we have been focusing most of our efforts on promoting it as a tool and expanding the possible results.

What were some of the biggest challenges you faced while building Sharpen Design and how did you solve them?

Anthony: I’d say we really tried to take the path of least resistance on this. We have both worked on a wide-ranging variety of projects over the last few years, but this one was by far the most simple. So while there was still a lot of work involved, we didn’t distract ourselves with anything that wasn’t essential to generating new design prompts.
Arman: Agreed, simplicity was at the core of Sharpen from day one. Making sure all 20,000+ possible combinations of prompts work well together is an ongoing challenge, but we’re actually leaning into that as a feature opportunity in our next major update!

Where do you see Sharpen Design in the next few years?


Anthony: We have a few different ideas for where this could go, but for now we’re excited just to see what people come up with. The purpose of the site was to give designers a tool to help them build and refine their skills and portfolio, and can’t wait to see what you make!

Arman: Like Anthony said, we’re really excited to see what people make with the tool we’ve made! A lot of how we want to grow the product over the next few years depends on what our users tell us – so let us know what you want to see!

If you want to test and widen your horizon they  have 20,o00+ art and design challenges running 24/7 http://sharpen.design. You may also follow them on Twitter (twitter.com/sharpen_design) and send them your entries to get featured on their newsletter.

Like our blog? Hi I'm Rachel a Business Manager at Love the idea. I head up social distribution and sales for our startup market. Get in touch!

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