The Daily Create provides a space for regular practice of spontaneous creativity through challenges published every day.
Each assignment should take no more than 15-20 minutes. There are no registrations, no prizes, just a community of people producing art daily. Developed as part of the ds106 open course on digital storytelling, TDC is open to anyone who wants a regular dose of creative exercises (and it more fun than jumping jacks, pushups, and P90X).
Here’s how to get started:
- Follow @ds106dc on Twitter. New assignments are posted each day at 5AM EST. The assignments will vary in mode– photography, drawing, audio, video, writing, and maybe an oddball one now and them.
- Once you’ve completed your assignment, follow the instructions on the Daily Create to reply via twitter. For your response to show up here you must include
@ds106dcin your tweet as well as the tag specific for that day, e.g.#tdc1666. - That’s it! It may take up to an hour for your response to show up here. NOTE: Your tweets will not show up if your account is protected; the API cannot access them.
We encourage you to challenge yourself to create something new each day instead of using older photos or videos. But there are no enforced rules- if you re-use media, think how you can make it new by re-editing them.
The assignments are designed to be quick to do and should not need any or much post-editing. Consider trying several different approaches to each assignments. Often your first instinct might not always be your best work. Experimentation is key, and as always, the one hard and fast rule is MAKE ART DAMMIT!
Reusing Daily Creates
You are more than welcome to make use of our Daily Creates for any kind of prompts for educational or creative activities. Many of them are borrowed or adapted from elsewhere, others have no indicated author. All Daily Creates are openly sharable under a Creative Commons CC0 license (attribution is still nice).
If you wish to give attribution, please just give created to the DS106 Daily Create and provide a link to the one you are using. Or add a comment to the bottom of a Daily Create to let us know where you used it. It tickles our little egos.
Daily Create Heros
Tumblr gif for “How to Improve Star Wars”
After the demise of The Daily Shoot, in January 2012, Tim Owens built the DS106 Daily Create site making it all work and look so pretty. Alan Levine added functionality for the Writing types, created a back-end admin tool to make creating TDCs less tedious, and populated the challenges from 2012-2104.
Starting in September 2015, we are moving to a new version of the Daily Create that does not rely on uploading to specific media services, all responses are done via Twitter. This uses a special Daily Blank WordPress theme developed by Alan Levine.
Mariana Funes has been managing the Daily Creates since mid 2014. She’s pretty awesome. Ask the internet. Alan Levine took the reins again in January 2016.
About ds106
DS106 began as a digital storytelling course offered for credit for students at the University of Mary Washington.
And ds106 is also open to anyone interested in making digital art along with us and is truly an online community of learners beyond UMW. We have an open collection of creativity assignments, a best of collection of participant works, even an internet radio station.
There is no cost and no obligation once you sign up. Learn more about ds106. it’s fascinating history, and how you can easily get started being part of the community.