I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “Choose a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” What a lovely thought, right?

NON. STOP. FUN!!!

I mean, high school guidance counselors and your weird aunt Carol, who cross stitches inspirational quotes on pillows, have been spouting this nonsense forever. Unfortunately it’s a total pipe dream. Anyone who has a job they love will tell you they actually work very hard.

I love being a graphic designer. I’m really proud of all the hard work I’ve done when a project goes well, but my job is certainly not free of challenges. Clients aren’t always happy with results, deadlines can be too short and sometimes getting valuable feedback feels more like pulling teeth.

That being said, even though graphic design isn’t ALL fun and games, it’s ok to have a little fun from time to time. I’ve tracked down a few of my favorite design games, so you can test your skills and be entertained all at once.

KERNTYPE:
Think you’re an expert when it comes to distributing space between your letters? This game will either confirm that or make you want to brush up on your skills a bit. The words progressively get longer and more challenging and if you’ve really got a competitive nature and think your spacing beats the example, you can submit it for approval.

THE BEZIER GAME:
Mastering the pen tool is something every illustrator has to do in order to be successful. This colorful game tests your ability to handle your angles and your anchors and challenges you to complete the shapes using the least amount of points.

XRITE ONLINE COLOR CHALLENGE:
According to the Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue Test, 1 out of every 255 women and 1 out of 12 men have some form of color vision deficiency. Those are some pretty crazy statistics, especially for the men. This game is pretty simple. You take four color bars and rearrange the segments in order of hue. Seems like an easy concept, but you might be surprised by how many times your eyes play tricks on you.

TYPE CONNECTION:
This is essentially just a dating game for typefaces. You first choose a main character to match after reading their personality descriptions. Next step is to choose a method of matchmaking and then a possible “suitor.” Once you’re sure you’ve got some typographic soulmates you get to send them on a date and find out how you scored. There are really informative posts when you finish, letting you know why a combination does or does not work.

KILL COMIC SANS:
No explanation needed. Now if we could just kill Comic Papyrus…

If these didn’t satisfy your need for a design geek break, there are a ton of other design games out there. Hopefully at least one of them will give you a laugh between client meetings, because while your aunt Carol and her inspirational quotes are absurd, having fun is almost as important as working hard.