Dribbble’s Silver Bucket Award
Each year the popular design platform, Dribbble gives out a prestigious Silver Bucket Award to the most active international Meetup Community. The Cape Town Dribbble Community was announced as the winner of the award for 2015! This is the first time that the bucket has landed on African shores and we wanted to share this amazing accomplishment with the community who helped make it happen. Needless to say our team was very excitable when the award arrived, see our happy faces below.
The event logo
We wanted the event logo to showcase and celebrate the achievement of the Cape Town Community. One of our talented designers at Isoflow, Neal Hampton, designed this beautiful emblem, combining the trophy with a mobile phone and a notification popping out. The smaller details of Table Mountain and the pen tool lighthouse celebrate Cape Town as the host of the event.
Inspiring talks *whilst munching on popcorn*
To compensate for the cold winter weather (a major deterrent in Cape Town when it comes to social events) we organised an old-school popcorn machine which kept attendees warm and their tummies content throughout the evening. Popcorn solves a lot of the world’s problems incase you didn’t know (along with beer and pizza, also provided by Isoflow).
The evening’s talks branched away from the usual illustration and animation content presented at previous meetups and they did not disappoint! Anita Iles, Operations Manager and UX Specialist at Isoflow talked about object orientated user experience design - ‘done is better than perfect’, from a case study perspective and Jon Edwards from Yuppiechef shared the different ways they’ve approached and thought about design as their business has scaled and developed over time.
Anita’s talk (also presented at the recent UX Johannesburg conference) showcased how using a methodology such as ‘object orientated UX’ can transform a business application. Quickchase is a platform which enables media planners and strategists to schedule and manage advertising campaigns for clients. Anita demonstrated how using ‘nouns’ rather than ‘verbs’ in areas like navigation can completely transform how users approach an experience that was previously inaccessible and confusing. Reworking the information architecture of Quickchase completely transformed the experience for users and intensive user testing was extremely beneficial in the creation of the final product.
Jon Edwards is the lead front-end developer and designer at Yuppiechef, South Africa’s favourite kitchen and home shopping website. Jon’s presentation was not only informative, but he also chose to illustrate each of his slides instead of using a powerpoint or keynote template which was a special attention to detail that everyone appreciated. It technically should be no surprise when considering that Yuppiechef is known for their handwritten cards they send to their customers.
Jon talked about Yuppiechef’s mission to bring people together — through food and sharing stories. The business has always focused on their customers and has grown tremendously in the last few years. This has come with a few challenges and he spoke about the ‘dark corners’ of the internet hiding ‘bugs’ from the past such as links that don’t work and design inconsistencies. There was also mention of the time they changed their logo and no one noticed (it was a great improvement nonetheless) and a touching story around design and accessibility. Jon has converted this talk into an awesome blog post which we highly recommend taking a look at.
Putting Africa on the map & trophy selfies ftw
We always have a little competition or two to add some excitement to the night and this time we held two, based around the Silver Bucket Award. Participants could try their hand at sketching an illustration for our analog playoff, with attendees voting for their favourite at the end of the night. The theme was ‘Putting Africa on the map’ and Christi du Toit won a cash prize for receiving the most votes — congrats! We also set up a little photo corner complete with props where attendees could grab a photo with the impressive trophy and post it to social media to win a prize.
Thanks to everyone for making our community so successful
We’re looking forward to our next meetup with more inspiring talks and opportunities to meet and network with fellow creatives. Be sure to join the Cape Town Dribbble Community Group and like the Facebook page to stay up to date with news and future events.
Please contact Isoflow at hello@isoflow.co.za if you’re interested in speaking at or sponsoring the next meetup.
