My Distaste for Dribbble
I finally understand my previous distaste for Dribbble
Up until a few months ago, I had a pretty nasty distaste for Dribbble. I was bewildered at the volume of designers posting the “redesigns of popular websites”, and concept art instead of thoughtful UI.
I was overwhelmed with the feeling that the majority of these designs were giving no consideration to requirements, users, or frankly, reality.
Wow was I wrong.
Coming up from a UX/Interaction design background I had myself convinced that Dribbble was wrong, because of the lack of process and design thinking. I agreed whole heartedly with Paul Adams, and held a vendetta against Dribbble — it was ruining design.
The problem is I never really looked at Dribbble for what it is.
So what is Dribbble?
What are you working on? Dribbble is a community of designers answering that question each day. Web designers, graphic designers, illustrators, icon artists, typographers, logo designers, and other creative types share small screenshots (shots) that show their work, process, and current projects.
Dribbble is a place to show and tell, promote, discover, and explore design. {Snippet from Dribbble’s about page}
Dribbble is a community. A community with the mission to push things forward in the creative space, and explore new techniques, styles and feelings. Dribbble is about exploring and learning from each other’s creative endeavours, and furthering the field.
It’s incredible where our creative minds can go when we remove the restraints of designing in real life. We remove the load of requirements, politics and compatibility, and simply create great things.
Dribbble, simply put, is a designer’s playground. The brand is fitted around a pink basketball after all — playful and fun. It is a getaway from the demands of real-life work for a creative, and I now understand that.
I didn’t reach this conclusion until this morning, after reading through Tobias’s post on Dribbble. I’ve been feeling more and more of a pull to dribbble in the last several months, and reading his article made everything click.
Contributing to the community
I think it’s hugely important to contribute to the design community, and further our craft. For that reason I feel incredible guilt for having avoided the platform for years.
I pledge to turn this around, and will be contributing more actively, and making time to ‘play’ and explore my design potential outside of the constraints of ‘real life’. I can see some incredible value in exercises focused around seeing how far you can take your creativity. Stay tuned for more here. {Follow along on Dribbble here}
The Dribbbilisation of design
I see clearer now, but it doesn’t mean my opinion has changed entirely. I still believe there is a level of ‘dribbilisation’ happening, and I still agree in part with Paul.
Dribbble is an incredible source of inspiration, and the portfolios of the individuals and teams can provide a spark in the deepest creative drought. It’s important to remember though that what happens on Dribbble, in most ways, isn’t real life. It may reflect pieces of real-life, and real projects, but in the end it’s just a 400 x 300px window into real-life design.
Keep on creating, discovering, and growing the community. Design makes everything possible.
Be sure to hit the ❤ if you enjoyed the article. I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts in the comments below! Thanks for reading!
If you haven’t read it yet — check out “The Problem with Dribbble” by Tobias van Schneider. Highly recommended.
Matt is a user-interaction/product/ux designer (a discussion for future posts) at chalk.com, and the founder of designchats.com; a meetup and slack community for designers in the Kitchener-Waterloo Region. You can find him on twitter at @mrae19.
