Eats, Shoots & Dribbbles

Why Design Is No Place For Rational Snobs.

Making Quality Products

This article is the reaction to our fellow designers’ trippiness about Dribbble.com being a hindrance for the industry and stopping us from making quality products.

The main idea behind all the criticism is Dribbble’s antithesis to the definition of design. Design solves specific problems.

Nothing against this statement.

But Dribbble.com was not designed in this context. It deals with a different hyle.

Now let’s give dictionary definitions a break and sit back for a moment. If you take a look at the Popular page and contemplate what you see, it won’t take long to realize that this platform is virtually the only one molding design trends and promoting them on such level.

Indeed, a colorful shadow under the button doesn’t solve shit but this technique has been used by every other designer on the internet by now.

The first place to spot this technique was Dribbble and a huge number of designers played with it for a goof and at some point it became a trend. And trends make their way into what we call “real” products. So a Dribbble-inflicted animation, gave us colorful shadows now used everywhere.

The point is, with all the alleged uselessness of Dribbble, “it’s fair to say I’m not the only one starting the day with a cup of coffee infused with the Dribbble-Behance-Pinterest trifecta.” — Kirill.

Providence

The case transcended beyond the buttons and vivid shadows. Same thing happened to the glitch effect experiments, augmented reality shenanigans, voice assistants, and so on. How did these ideas come up?

A quick experiment: trace all the major design communities after a big tech event (or any hyped event) and guaranteed Dribbble will be the first one to react.

For example, 2017 US Presidential Campaign or the latest Apple Special Event. In both cases, before the events went down, designers were already in the mix iterating ideas, biases, and sharing mockups.