Lessons from Speed Build Challenge 2022

If you’ve watched any of the past Speed Build Challenges then you’ll know how much skill and creativity is required to even attempt to build something cool in just 10 minutes. This year I wanted to try it myself so I could see if I have what it takes. After watching all the previous videos, I thought “OK, I’ll give it a go!”…

It was a great opportunity for me to test my speed and what I can build in 10 min in Webflow. Webflow is an incredible software for designers who love drag and drop. It allows you to create websites, including CMS, web apps, and templates.

Here are my top 8 lessons that I learned from this challenge-

1. Creativity The creative process is one of the most important parts of the project. This can be anything from a cool intro to a killer animation or a beautiful storyboard. The Webflow team provided us with some assets and Lottie animations that were to be used in the project. We weren’t allowed to use anything else. Using just these assets we had to show how creative we could get. With a great concept that can wow your audience, it doesn’t matter whether you build it in 3 min or more. e.g, Shais created ellipses on cursor movement in the qualifiers round in 5 min and managed to win everyone’s attention.

2. Understand Webflow For this challenge, you need to know the tool inside out. You need to know the shortcuts with the keyboard to get faster and learn different aspects of Webflow to get creative. Many participants were using blend mode, blur, 3d perspective, transform, etc. to express their creativity. KC used a cat and added a blur effect to make it a cloud for her prompt on the Weather card UI in the semi-final round.

3. Animation This year Webflow wanted to test how familiar you are with the interaction panel. This challenge helped me explore different types of animations that I could use in my projects. I had never used mouse movement before but during my practice sessions, I explored how to use this interaction. I went through a couple of “Made in Webflow” projects to find inspiration and learn how animations work. But the idea of the challenge was to keep your interactions simple yet creative, as you have got a time limit. Felixander Yuan used many of the native Webflow interactions in his projects to go that extra mile.

4. Practice It’s all about practice. The more you practice, the better, faster, and more confident you become. With practice, you start using the keyboard shortcuts efficiently and have more time to be creative with your build. It’s important to remember that you’ll make mistakes when you are on a live stage. But if you practice your build, you reduce the chances of error.

5. Room for error When you are on the live stage you get nervous, and with the time limit, you always make errors when building the project. Instead of panicking, the idea is to overcome those errors. If possible, preview your project before the time limit ends, to make sure everything is working as planned.

6. Get inspired At the end of the challenge, it was inspiring to see what all the challengers came up with their ideas, given the restriction of images and Lottie animations. Watching their projects broke the limitations of my creative imagination and inspired me to go even further.

7. Reflection To be honest, when you are on the live stage you shake from the inside with nervousness and excitement. During the live stage, your mindset is important because many times we plan something else but execute differently. But once it’s over, you feel a different sense of achievement. You might feel that you could have done better or something different, but that’s the whole point. This challenge helped me reflect on what could have been better or different. It helped me reflect on my skills and knowledge.

8. Have fun In the end, even if you don’t win the challenge, the bonus point is you get to know the other challengers and the Webflow community. You get inspired to learn more, do more and go beyond your imagination.

I didn’t participate to win, I participated to test my capabilities and imagination. For every challenge, the idea is not to win but to learn and push your boundaries.

Thanks to Nelson and the Webflow team, who organized this challenge and came up with such a great concept where Esports met Webflow.

References-

Cheers

Ankita Gupta