Dribbble Continues to Build a Community with New Search Feature

By: Gannon BurgettDecember 21st, 2012 Category: News

Dribbble recently rolled out yet another feature for their Pro members which helps them connect not only with each other, but also potential employers. While I’m not yet a contributing member of Dribbble, it’s obvious from the outside that the community within Dribbble is as strong of a community as you can get, especially when narrowed down to a field such as design.

The new feature is a little widget of sorts which allows the sorting and filtering members of Dribbble by skills, availability, location, and other criteria. It’s been implemented into the “Find Designers” section of Dribbble for easy searching for talent to hire. It’s also available throughout other sections of the site, such as narrowing down people within lists and even your followers. In the words of Dan Cederholm, the founder of Dribbble.

Want to see who your favorite Dribbbler follows near Chicago that does illustration? A few clicks and…presto. You now have the power.

Building a community

Designers from every inch of the globe are contributing some of the most well thought out and implemented designs the industry has ever seen. When Cederholm and his team founded Dribbble, I have a feeling they didn’t have a clue just how great of a platform it would become. Maybe they did, though. Regardless, it’s a platform and community that almost every designer gains inspiration and motivation from.

Dribbble has already managed to create a very nice system of organizing designers with all types of skills, living all across the world, and making potential employers lives much easier by allowing them to narrow it down to a specific field and/or location for potential hires. This is just one of the things that fuels and sustains the community on Dribbble; knowing that there are some extremely well-respected companies and individuals out there who are searching for talent. This motivates designers to only put out their best work and truly challenge their own abilities.

Not only is the potential for a job enticing, but as I mentioned above, the community of designers alone creates an atmosphere that pushes you to be the best you can be. From Playoffs to Debuts, people are consistently striving to challenge their current ways of thinking and step out of their comfort zone to contribute to a website full of designers from every walk of life.

All of this wouldn’t be possible though, if it weren’t for the work of Cederholm and his team at Dribbble. They pride themselves on creating community of designers; of all types; from across the street to across the oceans. From what I’ve seen since I’ve hopped on the bandwagon (albeit a bit late) they’ve managed to do that extremely well.

With the release of features such as this new search function, the team at Dribbble is insuring that it will stay on the top of their game at making it the go-to place for sharing, promoting, and discovering design.

http://twitter.com/zancler Zander Brade

Not to be that guy, but you’ve put ‘Dribble’ instead of ‘Dribbble’ like 3 times.
http://twitter.com/zancler Zander Brade

Not to be that guy, but there’s a couple of ‘Dribble’ typos throughout.
http://jarederondu.com Jared Erondu

fixed. Thanks!
http://www.gannonburgett.com Gannon Burgett

Thanks for catching those. I gave it a second run through but still managed to miss them. As Jared stated, they’re corrected. Sorry about that.
http://www.lockedowndesign.com/ John J. Locke

Let me first say that I think the world of Dan Cederholm. A lot of what I know about CSS is due to Dan and Eric Meyer. That being said, I still get frustrated (saddened?) by the core of how Dribbble works. You say it yourself in the beginning of your article: you’re not a contributing member yet. Until you get an invite, 95% of the functionality of Dribbble is useless. I know this was originally built into Dribbble to throttle it’s growth until it could be manageable, but when I see designers with twenty times the talent that I have with no invite, and yet another hundred shots that are a social icon that looks indistinguishable from any other on the Web, something is not 100% right. The Web should always be a meritocracy, but I really do look forward to a day when Dribbble can be a community for anyone who wants and deserves to be there.
http://twitter.com/DanRuswick Dan Ruswick

I’ve become annoyed with Dribbble’s infatuation with exclusivity. Just being able to use the service necessitates the arduous task of securing an invite, either by soliciting them from your (generally recalcitrant) network or pleading for them on Twitter, etc. Moreover, the process appears to be totally arbitrary: there is a huge amount of mediocre and banal work on there. At that point, the exclusivity ceases to become a meaningful way to regulate the quality of the content, and instead becomes a way to propagate an elitist mentality throughout the network, and to artificially inflate the notoriety of Dribbble as a company. I appreciate networks like Forrst infinitely more because they afford you a way to request access to the service that doesn’t entail some absurd and onerous process. In doing so, they strive for quality instead of notoriety.