After Hours The Uncensored Edition #8 — Dribbblification of Design | Recap
ADPList After Hours is a panel discussion where mentors share their views and personal experiences on everything that designers can and may face throughout their careers. We talk with no formality and diplomacy. Who else is ready for some ‘raw and spicy’ talks?
At the start of September, Brian Lin, Bronwen Rees, and Natashia Tjandra gave us a very real run-down on how platforms like Dribbble have misconstrued people’s perceptions of design work. True to the nature of our After Hours series, the panelists didn’t sugarcoat their words and provided a very honest reflection on how and whether Dribbble or platforms like it, offer value to junior designers.
In this article, I’ll be summarizing some of the key points brought up during the session and paraphrasing the questions and answers shared by our speakers.
Introducing our guest speakers:
🌟 Brian Lin (he/him) is Director of Design at Thriver and has been practicing design for 20 years working in advertising, at design agencies and startups. Fun fact! He’s eaten his way across 25+ countries. 🌎
🌟 Bronwen Rees (she/her) is a Senior Product Designer at Xer. Her role as a female design leader is to build up and mentor a generation of great women designers. Fun fact! For a number of years, she used to be able to ride a unicycle. 🚲
🌟 Natashia Tjandra (she/her) is a Senior Manager of Product Design at EA with broad experience at the intersection of design, data, technology, and marketing. Fun fact! She’s a proud typenerd, and shares truths and positivity on Instagram in three beautifully designed words. 💖
Introducing our ADPList host for the session:
🌟 Kasey Randall (he/him) is a Senior Interaction Designer at SiriusXM. Over the years he’s helped craft and elevate digital products through the transformative power of design and technology. Fun fact! He loves anything with mint and he has an 8-year-old pug mix named Dobby 🐾
The ‘dribbblification’ of design
Most, if not all of us, are familiar with Dribbble: a self-promotion and social networking platform that allows digital creatives to share their work online. It is the ideal platform for showcasing beautiful design work, but as Bronwen noted, it is an environment where design happens without purpose. By removing the purpose from design and only offering an end-solution, there is a myth created around what UX design really is.
By logging onto Dribbble, you come across aesthetically pleasing visuals but have no idea of what process was involved in coming to those design solutions. Are they solving real design problems? Natashia pointed out that it’s hard to evaluate a design without knowing whether it answers a design problem, whether it answers user needs or whether it addresses the business impact of a product. However, she also understands how platforms like Dribbble and Behance are good to go to when seeking inspiration.
Natashia: I came from a graphic design background. I love beautiful graphics and I still go to Dribbble or Behance to get inspiration. I’m really conflicted by it, but there are certain things we need to communicate in UX design and as UX designers, and those things cannot be ignored.
How the ‘dribbblification’ of design has affected the UX field
On a more positive note, Brian mentioned that platforms like Dribbble have a globalized design in a way that would not have been possible 15–20 years ago. Although there were repositories for graphic design and illustration work at the time, there wasn’t anything for interfaces. It’s through platforms like Dribbble that new generation designers have a means of accessing and showcasing design work on a global scale.
That being said, Brian also pointed out that because Dribbble is such a socially driven platform, it’s very easy for designers to become motivated by likes and hearts.
Brian: “It’s like the Tinder for design.”
Bronwen also brought up a very important question, do platforms like Dribbble confuse people on the difference between UX and UI? I remember when I was first starting out in the design industry, and there were so many terms and nuances that I also got confused by! Do I want to be a Visual Designer, UI Designer, UX Designer, Interaction Designer…?
When it comes to UI and UX design, Brian stated that Dribbble is not solely responsible for causing confusion because, for a long time, both terms have been conflated with one another and merged together. Younger designers tend to assume that UX is entirely digitally-focused; it’s the experience on a digital screen. However, it’s more than that. According to Brian, a lot of responsibility falls on educational institutions and boot camps that have been pushing misleading narratives of what UX and UI are over the last 15 years, and it’s now the responsibility of designers, mentors, and institutions to unravel this misconception.
Natashia: It’s really unfortunate that new graduates think that UI is UX and that you have to be really great in both UX and UI to get a position in a company. UX Design is being interchangeably used with Product Design and there’s no clear definition between UX and UI. It’s really important for us to course-correct.
Design is more than just making things ‘pretty’
I’m sure we’ve all fallen victim to believing or spreading this mentality at one point or another, and our panelists did a great job in setting the record straight. As stated by Brian, it’s okay to use Dribbble as a starting point for mood boarding or finding inspiration. It’s a great platform for sharing work you’re proud of! However, the bad part is what Dribbble and platforms like it have done to skew people’s perceptions of design. It has influenced stakeholders to look at beautiful designs, the point at them, and state that they want that, even though that’s not how it works.
Brian: In my 20 years, almost every place that I’ve landed in, part of the job is education, because people just don’t understand why they hired you. From the job description, it sounds like they know, but they don’t.
Natashia: My biggest pet peeve is when they say to me or my team, go and make it pretty. I’m like, “What?!”
Bronwen: Yes!
Natashia: Design is not about pretty-fying things. It’s that yarn ball that we’re all trying to untangle to say, “This is not it.” We don’t only make things pretty. There’s so much reasoning and science behind it and stakeholders just don’t understand.
Natashia also highlighted that education doesn’t have to be the sole responsibility of design leaders. Every single individual in the industry is an ambassador for UX design, whether you’re just starting out or have several years of experience. We all have the power to course-correct. It’s important to remember this point because it’s easy to assume that something isn’t your fault if you haven’t had a hand in creating the problem, but as designers, we also have a responsibility in shaping the future of our own industry. Highlighting the processes behind UX design in our own work is part of that responsibility.
Bronwen: I had a session on ADPList and someone was showing me some of their work, and it was amazing, but you could tell that they had been influenced by Dribbble, but also by some of the courses that are out there. They’d show me this beautiful design and it was fantastic, but I had to ask them 2 questions, how does this work from an accessibility point of view? The second question was, have you thought about mobile and how things work responsively? They are basic questions that had never been posed to them inside their course, and I think that’s showing that education has to come from everywhere: your boot camps, your courses, and from us as design leaders.
Educating people on the UX design process
It can be hard to know how to approach educating people on good design practices. Thankfully, our panelists had some great advice. Brian’s go-to strategy when entering a new organization, aside from taking stock on how things are going and talking to the key people involved in UX design, is to position the challenges that exist in the organization as problems worth solving. It’s not just about solving user problems, the organization itself is also your audience.
Brian: UX is greater than just the output of what you create on the screen. It’s how you influence decisions in an organisation; it’s how you influence the way business decisions happen. You might not have a seat at the table, but believe me when I say that the small micro-decisions you are making influence the outcomes.
Bronwen also pointed out how effective it can be to bring your stakeholders on the journey. As designers, we tend to have a habit of preferring to work alongside people who speak our language, but the whole point of education is to show your process. Invite your stakeholders to observe your user testing sessions. Ask them to participate in a workshop.
Bronwen: By showing them and getting them to be a part of the process, they’re going to realise very quickly that what you do is not just make things look pretty, you actually do so much more and you probably have a greater understanding of their customers, and a greater understanding of their needs than they probably do. And they might find that quite outstanding.
Using Dribbble as a portfolio
According to Brian, it’s about using the right tool for the job. For hiring managers, they look at portfolios to assess how the candidate critically thinks, how they approach a problem and frame it, and how they uncover opportunities for a solution. Dribbble is not the ideal interface for communicating all that information in a few lines within the shot description.
However, Brian also emphasized that Dribbble can still be a companion piece to your main portfolio. Sometimes hiring managers are interested in seeing what you are working on in your spare time. You might primarily be a 2D interface designer but do a lot of 3D work on the side, and Dribbble is a great platform for sharing the additional work you do. You can then add your Dribbble profile as a link to your portfolio or resume.
Brian: I am guilty of auto-dismissing some of these Dribbble portfolios because there are 1,000 other portfolios waiting for me to look at that don’t just have a Dribbble link, so why would I just look at a Dribbble shot?
Bronwen: If a designer is choosing Dribbble as their only portfolio, they’re not choosing the right tool, and I think that tells you a lot about the level of maturity potentially of the designer at that point as well.
Natashia explains that it’s important to be strategic about what you want to get out of the platform you choose to use. What do you want people to take away from looking at your page on Dribbble? What do you want them to take away from looking at your case studies on your portfolio website? She noted that Dribbble is great because it gives you visibility, it’s just about how you can use that attention effectively.
Using platforms like Dribbble for the right purposes
In Kasey’s personal experience, he mentioned that he started out almost 10 years ago on Dribbble, focusing on interface and interaction design. For him, Dribbble was a great way to get his work out there and to connect with other designers around the world. It’s also a good tool for improving your visual design skills.
Kasey: So one of the things that came up is doing UI Design Challenges. That’s really important for folks that want to improve their interface design skills, posting those challenges on Dribbble and getting feedback, showing their work, like Natasha said, getting that visibility out there.
However, when it comes to the UX context, Kasey asked if Behance would be the right platform to go with. According to Bronwen, she has a love-hate relationship with Behance. It’s beautiful from an inspirational point of view, but it’s lacking in the accessibility department.
Bronwen: If I am looking at portfolios, whether they’re on Dribbble, Behance or just a personal portfolio, and they’re not accessible or they don’t talk about accessibility, I’m going to have some concerns that the designers don’t understand the needs of the industry at the moment.
The problem with Behance is that you’re often uploading huge JPEGs to create your presentation and are unlikely to be able to capture the content of each image within an alt-tag, which makes them hard to understand through a screen reader. Brian also emphasized that Behance often requires a ridiculous amount of scrolling to get through a presentation, especially on mobile.
Brian: I’m not going to scroll and pan my way through an image to try and understand what it is you’re talking about. Even if it’s the best looking and best use case that’s ever existed in history, it’s not gonna get looked at.
Natashia: All of us have 1,000 portfolios to look through like every other day, so the best way to stand out is to figure out what’s the kind of job you’re looking for. If you wanna work at Spotify, for example, study Spotify. Look at the culture, look at what things they’re looking for and then figure out if Dribbble or Behance is the best medium to showcase your skills.
Using Dribbble for inspiration
All of our panelists shared that they use Dribbble for inspiration. Brian particularly highlighted that it’s a great platform for observing new trends. His team at Thriver will often throw images into a Figjam from Behance or Dribbble because they house great work. The key thing to understand is that platforms like Dribbble and Behance are great for showing outstanding designs, they just aren’t going to be helpful when trying to get hired because they don’t communicate who you are as a designer or as a person.
Bronwen emphasized that you can use Dribbble as a support piece and simply communicate what you use it for. Is it a space for your learning? A space to be able to push your creativity without restraints? It’s good to show extra-curricular work if you want to.
It’s important to keep in mind that hiring managers aren’t going to spend ages scouring through your portfolio. Both Brian and Natashia mentioned that they spend typically 5 minutes looking at portfolios, and in that time frame, they’re looking to see if anything jumps out at them. Dribbble makes it difficult to highlight who you are and how you think as a designer immediately, which is why it’s not the best portfolio piece. Use it to show your flexibility and creativity as a designer, but also think of how you can use other platforms to communicate your thinking.
Interested in learning more about the ‘dribbblification’ of design? Check out the Q&A segment in the replay! Or connect with our speakers below:
🌟 Book a session with Brian Lin.
🌟 Book a session with Bronwen Rees.
🌟 Book a session with Natashia Tjandra.
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