Why We Love Dribbble

Created by Rich Thornett and Dan Cederholm, Dribbble was planned to be a side project, but since going from strength to strength, Dribbble seems to be the industry standard go-to resource for discovering and connecting with designers around the globe. In the words of It’s creators, Dribbble is a “Show and Tell for Designers”. And here at Shape we simply can’t get enough of it!

Growing up, Rich wanted to become a professional basketball player but found his skills as a Developer and Designer were much too strong to live that dream, So he decided to give Dribbble an out-of-the-ordinary theme.. With terms like teams, shots, rebounds, buckets, player cards, and a player handbook, Dribbble is every bit inspired by the game of Basketball.. I find this gives it a quirky edge over any similar sites, it's gives it a friendly character and makes people want to come back again and again.

From friends and family, to clients and fellow designers, Dribbble gives the Design Community a way to be more active online.

One of the main reasons Dribbble is good for a Studio like Shape is that Web Design isn't as fast as your average Graphic Design job. Although we aren't necessarily restricted to Web Design, we do deal with Web Design in pretty much all of our jobs at Shape, and with websites, they generally take a lot longer to design, develop, build and complete than your average Graphic Design job.

For instance, Web Design has so much more possibilities when Designing, things like Button/Link hovers, Colours, Fonts, Is it one page, or multiple pages? How many Pages does the site need? What will that link do when you press it? Where will it take you?.. The list is endless!

For instance we recently finished a website for Rachel Bates (Which is due to go live on Wednesday), an interior designer whose passion has driven her to start her own business. The project started over 12 months ago, with 3-4 months of that uploading content, which I can assure you is no mean task, 2000 products proved to be a pretty time consuming effort.

Taking this time into consideration, from the outside it would have seemed like we hadn't been doing much, or had slowed down, which is never good.. But with a resource like Dribbble, it helps us to constantly update our followers with jobs like Rachel Bates, therefore helps us to build a good online presence.

Just as a comparison, In the time we have built this website, We have undertaken plenty of general Graphic Design jobs, from logo designs and branding, to print designs and brochures, these have all been designed, developed, and finished in the time it took to build just one website!

Without rambling on too much, What I’m trying to get at is that Dribbble helps us to be active on the portfolio front, and with its more laid back feel helps us to be less picky with what we share to our followers.

Dribbble helps us to show snapshots of ongoing projects which ideally leads us to more followers, a greater audience, and ultimately more clients, which is always good. At present all 5 of us are regularly updating our Dribbble ‘Dashboards’ which are shared on Shapes ‘Dashboard’ also.

Dribbble can also be used to post several designs and to ask the opinion of thousands of skilled Designers across the world.

Unlike any average online portfolio sites, Dribbble is quicker, and easier. For example, I have got an online portfolio on a website called Behance, which is run by Adobe. It would be an understatement to say I haven't updated my Behance profile in a while, the whole website, and tone seems to be a little serious for me, and Designers only post completed, polished Designs. Other than the ‘Work In Progress’ section which has the slightly corny alias of ‘WIP’, there is nowhere to share your ongoing, and very much incomplete designs, and to be honest I don't think anyone actually looks at that section on Behance, so to post any 'WIP' would be a complete waste of time.

If you are at all interested, You can go check out my Behance Profile Here.

I find Behance a little lacklustre and have contemplated deleting my profile as I can’t see any reason why I would share any of my work on there in the future, when Dribbble has given me a much more enjoyable user experience when sharing my work. Behance is the Portfolio equivalent to what Tumblr is to blogs, like really.. Does anyone ever go on Tumblr? ( However, a good feature of Behance is that you can link it through to LinkedIn ).

At present it’s my job to keep Shape’s activity high on Dribbble, I usually upload 3-4 ‘Shots’ on a Tuesday and the same on a Thursday or Friday depending on my workload. I try to keep it fresh and I am constantly experimenting with different ways of showcasing our work, On Dribbble you can post pretty much anything which is good for us, we have the freedom to do what we want.

Since it’s creation Dribble has grown from strength to strength Dribbble has 6 million active users and 3.5 million registered users, on average posting 1 shots a day, and 420,337,289,695 Pixels Dribbbled, I’d say Dribbble is one of the best online resource sites in the world at this time for design and digital. Other than document sizes, there are no restrictions, and no hassle, You just choose your image, click upload, and your done.. simple huh?

I would recommend all of my Designer friends to give Dribbble a ‘shot’ (Pun Intended)

Why don't you check out our Dribbble Dashboard.