The Challenge

Dribbble (a popular online platform for digital designers) hosts playoffs, which are design contests often in collaboration with other companies, every few months. In May 2021, they had a playoff in collaboration with NVIDIA Studio to reimagine NVIDIA’s mascot: “a mythical creature with four massive, rabbit-like ears”.

My Approach: Focusing on the Judges as a User Group

Even though this was not a UX project, I still decided to take a user-focused approach to my design by putting myself in the judges’ perspective. The challenge had already started when I found out about it, and looking at the entries that were already submitted, I noticed many people were making designs with interesting patterns. Although they looked very nice, I thought about the judges and how they would select a winner. Since there would be so many submissions, the judges could only spend a few seconds looking at each submission. If I made a mascot with an interesting pattern, that would not make me stand out from the other submissions of mascots with interesting patterns. As a result, I decided to take a different approach than what most people were doing so far. Instead, I focused on what stood out in the mascot which were the large ears. NVIDIA even highlighted these “massive, rabbit-like ears” in the contest description so I knew it was also significant for the judges.

My Design

The shape of the ears reminded me of fortune cookies, so I decided to turn them into fortune cookies. This then inspired me to combine foods and items from traditional Chinese cuisine as well as American-Chinese cuisine into my design such as fortune cookies, the lucky cat statue, zongzi, sesame seeds, egg rolls, a dumpling, and noodles. I was happy with what I created and glad I could have a chance to practice my creativity and art skills in a fun challenge, regardless if I won or not. Below is the final version of my mascot that I submitted!

The Results!

Two weeks later, I was so surprised and happy to find out that I won first place out of 128 entries! I believe that besides my design, my focus on the judges’ perspective when thinking of my idea really helped me to succeed in this challenge. If I were to enter more of these design challenges in the future, I definitely will continue to take a user-focused approach to help my work be more memorable to the judges!