For those who many not have context, Dribbble is a popular platform in the design industry where designers publicly post designs up. It’s kind of like Instagram, but specifically for design work. The idea is that it allows designers to share work, connect with other designers, and also develop a kind of portfolio of work publicly.
From the outside, you’d think designers would think this is a great idea! But, in actuality, Dribbble has a somewhat negative reputation among designers, broadly speaking: if you hang around designers enough, you might have heard of “the Dribbblization of design.” A search of this phrase returns numerous articles, including one that defines this phenomenon clearly, from Intercom’s blog:
Too many designers are designing to impress their peers rather than address real business problems. […] Much of the product design work from job applicants I’ve seen recently has been superficial, created with one eye towards Dribbble. Things that look great but don’t work well. Perfect pixel executions of flat design, but work that doesn’t address real business goals, solve real problems people have every day, or take a full business ecosystem into consideration.
Well written, and well argued, certainly. For those who may not know, this is a commonplace perspective — Dribbble is largely considered a place for people to post such frivolous things as aesthetic explorations. Aesthetics are broadly understood as beneath the value provided by real designers, and posting only visual explorations is understood as a sign of weakness from a designer. After all, visuals, as it is believed, are the domain of the simpleminded and the ineffectual, of those who don’t appreciate the more important matters.
I’m going to come out and share my perspective, however: my answer to the titular question of this article is “no.” If you’ll allow me, I’d love an opportunity to share why I believe this.
Expectations, you know?
Until some weeks ago, Dribbble didn’t have the ability to post more than a few pictures in a carousel — but even that’s not what most people do when they post, as posting more than one image is a paid feature. Most people are not paid users, either, and are unlikely to be at any given point in their Dribbble tenure.
There’s also no way to combine images with text, which is critical if you want to be able to explain a concept and then show a supporting visual to explain it further. This means that you get a description box and some images above it. That’s really it.
By the very nature of the product, is it really reasonable to expect anything else but visual explorations being posted? There’s a reason why Medium, Notion, personal sites, and other longform solutions have more actual case studies being made on them, rather than on Dribbble (itself which only recently added longform, text-and-image combo editing weeks ago). Dribbble cannot be used to post content that’s actually exploring interesting products and functionality. There’s just no affordance for that.
Look, it’s a cool place to share stuff that looks good. I think that’s acceptable, personally — do you?
Beware: there is heresy afoot
I know this is heresy, but hear me out: good visual design is actually very complicated, and takes a lot of hard work to acquire. It’s also very technical, by nature: whether it’s on the web, or in entertainment products (e.g., video games, movies, etc.), executing on good visuals is a highly costly (sometimes money, but almost always in performance) and technical pursuit.
Building beautiful products takes an enormous amount of skilled, technical execution from engineers. Consider that entire game engines are written and rewritten just to improve things like collision to create reasonable behaviors when objects collide; physics are replicated with painstaking dedication in game engines; algorithms are thought and rethought — and rethought again — just to create plausible visual randomness in assets; asset generation and management is enormously costly, and some people are hired just to make technical pipelines for artists to create convincing grass textures on the floors of games; writing shaders that are performant across all kinds of devices to access internet products (e.g., browsers) requires lots of dedicated, low level graphics programming, too; and so on. This is extremely admirable and takes such an incredible amount of technical experience — and raw grit and patience.
In non-entertainment related products, like internet services (e.g., apps), good visual design is much more constrained, particularly due to device performance concerns, but also partly due to how standards and precedents were set in the early internet, and how they have been inherited over time. For this reason, good visual designers tend to consider visual design for apps to be very easy, and sometimes repetitive. This is because it is.
But that’s what makes Dribbble interesting: it’s a place for people to post beautiful explorations of how internet-based products and services could look — without commitment. We all benefit from this, because:
- If we’re being honest, looking at things that look good feels good. Good craft matters to pretty much everyone — beauty is intrinsically enjoyed by a great deal of mammals, including humans. It’s okay to admit this!
- Pushing the visual envelope has a positive effect on the standards in technologies like CSS, Swift, and other developer tooling. For example: CSS adding support for variable fonts so that designers can do fun, interesting visual effects with type and motion; Chrome adding support for multi-colored type so that designers can make interesting color combinations with type and still keep it all as glyphs, instead of images (accessibility, yeah?), which is an upshot for network performance, too.
There is lively debate in these corners of the world — how to design CSS so it accommodates new expectations, how to redesign renderers for better performance, and so on. As organizations that maintain important developer tooling and services notice the way that aesthetics are pushed and consumer expectations evolve, they work hard to create standards that accommodate all these changes. This improves usability and performance across internet services more generally. This means that, as technologies that are used on the internet improve, the products and services that use those technologies also improve — the resultant effect is that more is possible with less (e.g., less strain on our devices and networks). As demand for more complex assets on the internet grows, technology standards we all rely on respond — and become more resilient. We all win in this equation.
Many designers may not understand or appreciate the amount of engineering work that goes into making textures, colors, shaders, and other things that make the internet possible, and what it’s like to work in production settings to produce beautiful assets that are performant and aware of device constraints. That’s a real shame — reserving judgement and having curiosity are great traits.
DFKM, but…
I realize some may assert that their product or feature is interesting when, really, from a product perspective, it’s all completely implausible — they might argue, “it looks good, though.” Well, it actually might look good — and there’s nothing wrong with that, in my view.
This, of course, does not mean that Sequoia’s going to be investing in that product featured in a 600kb PNG on Dribbble any time soon. But is that really the expectation we should have for people posting good-looking stuff on the internet? Should we be looking down our noses on people who just want to post something that looks beautiful? How many designers can say that they are willing to put in the necessary time and effort to build the muscles required to create beauty — and execute on that in a production setting?
And, sincerely, I don’t mean to cross any lines, but I do have to ask: is having good visual design and an understanding of how products and markets work worse than having neither? Because, from what I can see, neither of these are common traits, anyway.
For all the talk about how unimportant visual design is, particularly from product design programs, I would instead expect to see graduates coming out as incredible entrepreneurs, building unforgettable products and features that people want to bang their doors down to buy off them, even if they look unprofessional. But I don’t see that. I see people spending thousands to come out with not only poor visual design, but also implausible case studies — ones that show not even a cursory understanding of markets and products, and then talking down on people who have the interest, humility, and grit to put in the work to at least make something excellent from a visual perspective.
Anecdotally, the problem appears to be very common. I noticed that all of the talks from ADPList’s first #BeMore conference about “how to break in” to design appeared to feature some advice cautioning against the prevalence of generic early career designer portfolios, and remarks that indicated how uninteresting those portfolios of products tend to be. I didn’t realize how many others feel this same way.
And, certainly, if one is attempting to convince hiring panels that one is good at digital product work, it is in one’s interest to show that one can understand businesses and markets, on which digital products and services are sold.
Further, I mentor so often (both on and off ADPList, usually around ten hours a week) that I consistently have to break the news to my mentees that, not only is their visual design unacceptable, but their case studies display no indications of decent cognitive ability with respect to how businesses and markets — and digital services sold by and on them — work. In the dozens of people I’ve mentored, I have seen maybe one exception to this rule.
I don’t enjoy telling people this at all, and mentees are always surprised when I let them know, remarking that no one has ever “told them the truth about [their] work.” This concerns me. Nonetheless, it happens so often that I just decided to write an article for me to send to mentees when they book me, with one in particular garnering some wider appeal and fascination:
The responses were interesting: in my private messages, scores of early career designers — mostly freshly out of design programs, or coming to — were contacting me, desperately begging for help about how to get more realistic and interesting case studies after unsuccessful attempts at competing on the market. It troubles me that the very same programs that have clear bias against visual excellence are also dropping the ball on product excellence. What excellence is there, then?
Some more seasoned designers and I discussed the subject matter, and they were also communicating how concerned they’ve been about the quality of early career designers coming out of design programs — all of them noticing how extensive the usage of formulaic case study checklists and prompts have become.
At this point, I know I’m not the only one that’s noticed this problem, and I think it’s clearly a more widespread problem than people with good visual design and no serious business sense.
Regrettably, I also notice it among some more experienced designers — they might de-emphasize visual design, despite it being much more easy to acquire for the purposes of making internet services (e.g., apps), and still have poor business acumen. I would expect that, if one isn’t using one’s time to develop great visuals, one would be spending time developing entrepreneurship (the ability to assess market demand and provide supply — in other words, the ability to make great products). But I don’t see that often, either.
I understand that it’s easy to cast aspersions on people who make beautiful things for the sake of it. One can view these people as simpleminded and lowbrow. But judging visual excellence without understanding the complexity beneath it seems unfair. And, anyway, working hard to produce excellence is good for the constitution — and at least they’re putting in work to bring some excellence to the industry in some way! This seems like more than some can say, anyway.
