Adobe Certified Associate World Championships
Annually, Adobe hosts a worldwide competition to find the best of the best among students that use their products. After 3 years of applying and improving my design skills, in the summer of 2018, I was fortunate enough to be one of 43 students chosen among 112,000 applicants in over 66 countries to participate in this amazing event. You can read more about the ACA WC 2018 and its winners that year here.
How it began
In my junior of high school, I picked up photoshop and illustrator as a hobby making t-shirt designs for my school’s science olympiad team. Having never taken any art classes before, my designs began with rigid shapes and limited color palettes. But as I designed more t-shirts of babies I realized I needed to learn design principles if I wanted my graphics to be visually appealing while still being effective. So I took off to Youtube and began learning design through various tutorials.
Eager to test out my newly found skillset, I participated in the school’s Business Professionals of America(BPA) Graphic Design competition. It was an annual competition where the participants had a chance to be flown out and compete at a national stage if they placed well enough at the regional and state levels.
I was able to dig up my 6-month design process leading up to the national competition, showing my improvements as a designer that year.
It was at the BPA nationals competition that I found out about the Adobe Certified Associate World Championships(ACA WC). The year I went to nationals, BPA had partnered up with Certiport to offer heavily discounted Certification tests for the student participants. It was here that I found out about Adobe certifications and the competition for students that got certified. I quickly got certified and submitted the same submission I used for BPA to the Adobe Certified Associate United States competition.
I didn’t hear back that year.
Resubmission
The following year, I continued to improve my design skills. While in 2016 I learned the basics of visual design, it wasn’t until 2017 where I learned about the UI/UX design process and transitioned from making t-shirts and posters to thinking about how and what design can achieve for its users. I outlined my process of learning about UI/UX here.
These realizations of how impactful UI/UX design was inspired me to design games as an exercise to practice how to create an intuitive user flow with a user’s experience in mind. This came in the form of the game, Qube. I later submitted screenshots of the game to the ACA WC, but my submission yet again didn’t continue on to the world's competition. However, that year I did receive an honorable mention as one of the top U.S. submissions.
While I failed to make it to the ACA WC, I now had a new goal in mind — create my own game studio.
Re-Resubmission
As I began the game studio, Tapp games, I began to design more and more casual games similar to Qube. Starting with basic games that I mocked up to more realistic games that actually went under development, I cranked out game designs all summer. You can read more about the results and collaborations I ended making with my team of 5 college students in my article here.
By the end of the summer of 2018, I had compiled a huge compilation of game mockups and decided to submit one last time to the Adobe competition.
Competition
The competition itself was an 8-hour live competition where all 33 participants from around the world were briefed by a non-for profit organization about a recent marketing campaign that needed a poster designed.
That year our non-for profit was TakingITGlobal, an organization that hosted live streams for any student around the world to participate in their live events. While I didn’t place in the world competition, it was a great experience being invited out and meeting up with fellow designers my age from all over the globe. Adobe actually wrote an article about my experience, here.
Key Takeaways
While this article was originally meant to be about the ACA World Championships itself, as I wrote the article I realized it really is the journey that counts. Man, that’s cliche.
But the competition itself wasn’t some pivotal moment that changed me as a designer. Instead, it was the design process and the goals I had in mind that brought me to the ACA WC and ultimately made me into a better designer.
You can read more about the ACA WC 2018 and its winners that year here.
