A Year (2020) of (almost) Daily (code) Sketches

Nina Lutz
12 min readJan 2, 2021

I have always been very very bad at habits.

This is shocking to a lot of people. Maybe because I love makeup and skincare and those are habits. Maybe because I always check if doors are locked a bunch of times before leaving. Or because I’ve conned MIT out of degrees.

But I am actually not amazing at habits, especially daily ones. I have never been good at journaling or meditating or keeping a consistent workout or sleep schedule. Life is varied and I am someone who has tunnel vision on each variance.

This year I challenged myself to do daily sketches in code.

These sketches started as a suggestion from one of my advisors at the MIT Media Lab, Zach Lieberman, who does his own daily sketches and has written about them.

So the fact that this year I programmed 263 sketches says a lot.

Sure, 263/365 is only 72% but I have definitely gotten worse grades in my life and doing something consistent for 72% of the hellscape of 2020 isn’t the worst.

Below are the screenshots of all 263 sketches, grouped by month, except for June where I did not do any sketches:

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Nina Lutz
Nina Lutz

Written by Nina Lutz

Instead of making computers think like people, I want to use them to make us think about other people.