These are fun and educational graphic design games that teach design fundamentals or simply improve your sense of design knowledge.
Design games can involve Photoshop functions, type recognition, or color information. Below are eleven awesome games for graphic designers that will help you learn graphic design or hone your skills!
Who says games can’t be educational? Though I’ll admit when I hear the concept of a design-centric game, I rarely assume it’ll be fun.
But after scouring the Internet for web games for graphic designers, I’m surprised how many fun activities for graphic designers are out there.
So I’ve organized this post on the best graphic design games you can play for free right in your browser. Use them to test and improve your design skills.
Fun Graphic Design Games
These are our favorite graphic designer games that teach various creative concepts. With this list at your disposal, you can play design games for free anytime.
1. The Bézier Game
Learning to use the pen tool is one of the most frustrating yet enlivening things a designer can do. It’s a must-know tool for everything from photo manipulation to digital painting.
This free bézier game is one of the best games for graphic designers to help you understand the complexity of pen tool manipulation. It can be tricky since the curves have to be exact to move on to the next level. But you’ll learn a lot and have some fun along the way.
2. Shape Type
Shape Type is a companion graphic design game also from Method of Action, the creators of the Bézier Game. Shape Type uses bézier handles to manipulate letterforms. You’ll still be learning about the pen tool, but in this case, from the viewpoint of typography.
Give these two design games for graphic designers a try and see what you think. They’re both useful for the absolute novice but also fun for the pen tool expert to test his/her design skills.
3. Kern Type
Most of us can recognize when typography isn’t kerned very well. But how many of us can fix those spacing and kerning issues?
Kern Type is another fun game created by Method of Action, the team behind the Bézier Game.
In this addictive design game, your objective is to move letters into proper kerning. It’s your task to figure out which letter(s) instigate the problem and how much rearrangement is required for perfect kerning. This can be frustrating over time, but it’s a great game to play for typography lovers and design perfectionists, and the rest of us can learn a lot by trying it.
4. The Font Game
The Font Game is straightforward, easy to play, and fun (especially for font and typography lovers). This graphic design game will give you the name of a font and four different text samples. You’ll have to identify the sample presented in the listed font. It’s a simple multiple-choice design game.
If you’re a typography lover, this is sure to be one of your favorite games for graphic designers.
Go ahead and test your own font identification skills! Can you tell one sans serif from another? You’ll find out if you try The Font Game.
5. Pixactly
If you want to put your eye to the test, give Pixactly a try. This design game tests your ability to draw shapes that perfectly match a set of dimensions, like a 40x80px box.
You draw right in the browser, and the results tell you each time what your pixel dimensions are and how far off they were from the stated goal.
You get five rounds, and your total score is tallied up. It works much like golf, where you want to be at 0 points by the end of the game.
While this may not make you a great designer, it will improve your eye for pixels, and it’s a fun way to pass the time.
6. CSS Diner
Looking to brush up on your CSS selection skills? Not quite able to memorize some syntax for modern CSS development?
Then try playing CSS Diner, a free open-source design game hosted on GitHub by Luke Pacholski. This game asks players to write the perfect CSS selector with requirements like the :nth-child pseudo-classes.
Each level gets progressively more complex, with 26 levels in total. While this game may not ensare every designer, it’ll surely capture the attention of designers with an interest in front-end development.
7. What the Hex?
As the name suggests, this is a hex color game for designers where you must guess the hexadecimal code for the color on the screen.
It’s a game made for designers with a fondness for color and minor nuances, just like the pixel matching game. But this game trains more than just your eye. It’s a means of memorizing the hex color system and learning the subtleties of hex values.
You select how many total colors you want on the screen, ranging from 2 up to 48. A hex code appears, and you click the color you think it represents.
You’ll probably struggle with this at first, but over time you’ll become surprisingly adept at hex color matching.
8. Color
Color is another game created by Method of Action. This game makes it fun to test your knowledge and color matching ability. Segments of the game include hue, saturation, complementary colors, analogous colors, triadic colors, and tetradic colors. Overall, it’s one of my favorite games for designers.
9. Logo Design Quiz
Brand design lovers will get a kick out of this logo quiz matching game. It’s a great graphic designer game.
Here’s how it works: a series of logos appear on the screen, each representing a letter of the alphabet. Some offer the full logo design, while others are only partial shots.
You have to guess which company the logo represents. It can be surprisingly tricky when just staring at a letter design, but it’s a great way to ingrain brand recognition into your brain.
This isn’t just for designers, but logo designers will especially love it.
10. Type Connection
Reminiscent of the old Love Connection game show comes Type Connection, a dating game for typography.
You start by choosing the main typeface and answering various questions. It’s the metaphorical equivalent of an online dating profile… but for typefaces.
Once you select, the fonts will be paired up and compared side-by-side. If you decide to match them up, you’ll get the Type Connection’s personal opinion on the matchup. You’ll get feedback about how compatible they are, as well as why they work well together or why they do not.
While this game is fun, it’s also very educational and effective at helping to teach the concepts and principles behind font pairing. The skills you develop here can be very helpful while you’re designing.
11. Color Test Challenge for Graphic Design
Color management company X-rite has built a really fun color challenge game for rearranging preselected colors in order of gradation, testing your visual skills.
The goal is to drag and drop colors in order based on hue. Many color palettes use washed-out shades or pastels to provide a more difficult challenge. And unlike the hex code game, this really does test your eye and reveals how well you can see colors in relation to each other.
Final Thoughts on Fun Design Games
So what do you think of the list? I’m sure you’ll find at least a few graphic design games you’ll enjoy playing and testing your design skills. And just as importantly, you’ll learn a lot along the way.
Playing graphic design games online is the perfect way to learn graphic design and improve. Try them, and you’ll see how fun graphic design can be.
And if you’re looking for more articles on design theory, try out these related posts:
- Ultimate Guide to Color Theory for Designers
- Tips for UI Design Colors and Color Matching Techniques
- Building with Web Colors: Codes, Tools, and Design Tips
