Community Building @ Dribbble
For over a decade Dribbble’s been a thriving, global community of designers—a place to share work, talk shop, get feedback, and make connections amongst fellow creative practitioners.
Community building: shaking hands, kissing babies, & talking design.
I’ve been a proud Dribbble community member since 2012—and finally got to work alongside the team in 2019, as community manager and event wrangler. My gig included a wide swath of responsibilities—developing community engagement programs, honing Dribbble’s affable, approachable brand voice, teeing up regular communications, and helping facilitate Dribbble Meetups across the globe.
I also got a chance to be a face representing Dribbble, including emceeing the main stage of Hang Time NYC, our 700-attendee design conference at New York’s storied Hammerstein Ballroom. I also spearheaded co-branded events, talked shop with Dribbble’s 700k+ Instagram followers in our livestreamed Dribbble Coffee Break, as well emceed and produced Dribbble’s virtual workshop sessions serving over 1,000 creative practitioners.
Writin’ words, too.
In addition to in-person community building, behind the scenes I also put pencil to paper crafting communications—this included weekly commentary for Dribbble’s Courtside emails, as well as contributing (usually typography-focused) featured articles for our popular blog, plus authoring community-facing platform feature announcements. Got to gets my hands dirty making accompanying imagery, too, which you’ll see below.
Flex that creativity in the Weekly Warm-Up.
One of the community initiatives I had the privilege of bringing to life was Dribbble’s Weekly Warm-Up—an inclusive, low-stress design prompt for the creative community to grow in their craft, together.
Design has enough cutthroat competition, right? Vapid, award-seeking, ego-stroking aplenty. In contrast, the Weekly Warm-Up is an earnest attempt to foster design simply for its own sake. No prizes, no trophies. Just the offer of encouragement to work beside your creative peers—of all skill-levels—in a joint pursuit of stretching one’s creative muscles over a common prompt.
To date, the Weekly Warm-Up has racked up thousands of submissions from designers across the world, and across a wide range of creative disciplines. And, yes—when time permits, I definitely try and throw my hat into the ring, which you’ll see below.
