How I Built the Largest New Design Community as a Student in 2 Months

I founded Design Buddies on April 10th, 2020. Over 2,400 people from all over the world joined in just over 2 months. Coming from a non-traditional design background, I was scared to reach out to other designers and engage in other design communities at first. I felt unqualified because I majored in bioengineering and spent years pursuing pre-med.

I have been interested in design, but felt intimidated to start because of some of the things I saw some people say in other design communities — about how designers who didn’t go to a traditional 4 year design school “aren’t real designers.” I created Design Buddies as an inclusive and beginner friendly community because it was what I needed while starting design.

Design Buddies has become an inclusive community where designers from any backgrounds to make friends, receive mentorship, and learn from each other.

⏰ Timeline

• Growth
• Events
• Community Partnerships
• Branding
• Admin Team Expansion
• Future Plans
• Lessons Learned

🌱 Growth

Design Buddies originally consisted of members of Asian Creative Network, when I asked the group of anyone in design wanted to create a chat back in February 2020. Nearly 200 people responded and I created a Messenger chat. As Messenger is a linear chat, members requested a Discord server for the channel system. It has since grown more than 10x.

As our member count has grown, our channel topics have also grown from the feedback. We have discussions ranging from learning design, events, finding project partners, jobs, development, books, recommendations, art and design showcase, critique, portfolio review, games, music, food, and more. We even have a casual topic of the week.

Members of Design Buddies have also invited their friends to the community and shared it in events and school organizations. Design Buddies has been growing rapidly through organic reach and has not slowed down.

We are launching our website and social media for further growth in the near furture. We plan to showcase community created content to hype our members up!

🌻 Events

3 weeks after Design Buddies was created, I hosted the first meetup via Zoom. Over 35 people came and we had a fun collaborative icebreaker activity on Figma.

We were also Zoom-bombed. 3–5 people came in during the first 5 minutes of the event. 1–2 people started yelling racial slurs against Asians, 1 person overtook the screen with inappropriate images, and multiple people filled the chat with offensive content against Asians and more racial slurs.

I did not see who the people were since all the boxes of people were moving very quickly and my computer was lagging a lot. I tried to remove those people in the call, but could not figure out who they were. I was not able to regain control, so I ended the meeting and created another one with a password to only share in closed chats and direct messages.

Most of the people who were in the original conference room came to the new conference room. Despite the Zoom bomb, most people came back. I’m grateful to those who stuck around and told me that it was okay and gave me advice. It was outside of my control, and it inspired me to think about new security plans.

🤗 Online Conferencing Safety

After the meetup, I told everyone in the community what had happened and my new security plans. The admin team of Design Buddies and I decided on having a verification step to access any meeting room (via Discord roles system). It involves filling out a short form with name and social media information. These extra steps are meant to prevent anyone with bad intentions to access a meetup.

Our second meetup was a success — we each made our own Animal Crossing styled character on Figma:

🤝 Community Partnerships

As we continued to grow, several other communities reached out to us to partner. With partners, we plan joint events and support each other’s communities. So far, we are partnered with intern.club, Students Who Design, Webbers, and We Design.

Additionally, we have experienced designers from industry offering to speak to us. More information is coming as we are planning our first industry AMA with Figma in a few weeks!

🌟 Branding and Outreach

With my supportive team of admins, we are in the process of creating our website and social media presence. It’s important to have a website as we expand and do more partnerships and collaborations. We have been sending out the Discord link to anyone who asks about it, but having a website helps organize all our information better. Our website will have a playful and friendly tone with bunnies (”Buddies”) as our mascot.

With our branding process, we started with some core values: Inclusivity, diversity, collaboration, and friendship. Our target audience is also students and new grads. That makes up most of our population but we also have a good number of members with over 10 years of experience in design who often offer to be mentors.

We launched our LinkedIn on Monday and are onboarding new admins to help us out.

🌿 Admin Team Expansion

Within a day of announcing admin positions, we have received over 35 admin applications. Some have wrote custom cover letters and resumes. We are doing our best to give everyone who wants to help out an opportunity to help out.

We are planning to keep an executive team and take on others with roles based on what they would like to do. We have roles related to design (website, brand, merchandise, social media), content creation, social media management, event coordinator, and more. We are also growing globally and will take on Asia and Europe representatives for future in-person meetups.

🤩 Future Plans

Coming soon:

• Design Buddies website and social media.
• Member feature series: Showcase content (eg. blogs or videos) created by any member on our social media to hype them up.

Upcoming:

• Merchandise: Going back to our bunny theme, our merchandise coming in the future will be featuring bunnies centered around the themes of friendship, diversity, and design.
• Mentorship program
• More speakers
• Community blog
• Newsletter

We have a lot of exciting plans and are always open to feedback!

🙌 Lessons Learned

• Focus on needs leads to growth. We focus on building a beginner-friendly community and fostering social connections during COVID-19.
• Listen to feedback. We have an anonymous feedback form and suggestions channel for server improvements. We act on ideas from members of the community.
• Inclusivity and diversity. We focus on creating a safe space for everyone by establishing ground roles and enforcing a disciplinary action to those who are disrespectful or scam.
• It takes a village. I’m grateful for everyone who has reached out to be an admin. It is impossible to handle growing and maintaining a community by myself.
• Mention future plans. Keep members excited by having a roadmap for the future.

Thank you for reading and you’re welcome to join Design Buddies and follow us on LinkedIn! If you’d like to apply to our admin team, fill out this form. If you’d like to have your content (eg. blogs, videos, etc) featured on our social media and upcoming website, fill out this form.

I’m Grace! 👋 I’m a UX Design Intern at Electronic Arts (EA). I enjoy drawing, social media, running, traveling, and exploring boba shops. Feel free to reach out on social media if you’d like connect/chat more about anything. I’m on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can check out my portfolio as well!

I wrote this article for Augment, a community of intern leaders who help empower and elevate students around the world. Check out our other articles on Medium!