Fireside chat with Dan Cederholm, Dribbble’s co-founder
For the third Product Stories event, we were proud and humbled to be able to host a last-minute fireside chat at Zenly new office in Paris with Dan Cederholm, co-founder at Dribbble.
Here’s the full recording of the event and some of the most interesting takeaways for those of you who couldn’t make it:
A brief history of a long and incredible career
As a young man when the web was really just starting, Dan was more into music, playing drums before switching to guitar and later banjo. He enrolled in several music programs before dropping out to work at a record label.
“Pretty quickly I realized I’m not gonna be a rock star and I’m probably not going on tour. I needed to make money.”
While working at a record label, he managed to work his way up to a desk that had Windows 3.1 and an Internet connexion. That’s when he got bitten by the web and the design. He learned web design from the ground up, mostly from what other designers’ blogs.
“I fell like I was in the right place at the right time where there was a great tight-knit small community of people that would blog about how they built websites with standards and CSS.”
Dan immersed himself in the designers’ community, sharing his own thoughts and learnings. Documenting how he worked helped him to get noticed and opening doors along the way.
One thing led to another: from blogging, to speaking at conferences to freelancing for top companies (ESPN, MTV, Microsoft, and Google, to name a few). He even told us a funny anecdote about being asked to design the first version of what was going to become Twitter! 😄
“You don’t have to be an expert to share something on a particular topic even if you’re learning it yourself. I think it’s actually a great time to sort of share your journey of how you’re learning.”
Dribbble inception, journey, and future 🏀
Dan launched Dribbble with his neighbor and talented Rails developer Rich Thornett on July 9th, 2009. They actually met each other through their kids and started sharing an office a couple of days a week.
“I wanted to see designers were working on. I wish I could look over the shoulder of people I admired and people I only see at conferences”
The concept behind Dribbble was really about “what are you working on?” and sharing sneak peeks of design content between designers.
Dan and Rich invited around a hundred designers they admired by sending them a t-shirt along with a handwritten code to join the beta. Most of them immediately joined, constituting the first members of the Dribbble community.
Dribbble wasn’t Dan or Rich’s full-time job. With their freelance work, family, friends and respective lives, they set-up an invitation-only system to control Dribbble’s growth. This system also ensured the platform’s quality with little effort on their part.
“The nice byproduct of that [invitation-only signup] is also that, because of the scarcity of the invites, people thought hard about who to invite. That helped the quality of the site and community.”
The community thrived quickly taking initiatives of its own. For example, organizing non-official Dribbble meetups, raising the brand’s worldwide awareness. The Dribbble team extends some help to these events by helping with logistics, communication, and merch.
Just two years ago, the team was made up of eight people. Today, nearly 50 people work remotely for Dribbble, organized into business segments and product squads.
Dribbble’s next challenges
- Allow new media sharing on the platform such as video
- Develop the job platform, improving employer and freelancer connections
- Create more content around the community’s designers (e.g. interviews)
- Perhaps the biggest one: scale the community, without destroying its essence
Food for thought on Product Design
“The more writing you can do, the better!”
Writing, documenting, and sharing your process and work is Dan’s top advice to all designers. Don’t assume that your work speaks for itself.
“The more knowledge you have, the better!”
Today, it’s advantageous to know how to code but in the future, Dan feels that it can totally change with more abstraction of code within the tech industry.
“It should be easier to create the things that we have to make on the web.”
“I wouldn’t know the first thing about a good VR interface”
New technologies (AR, VR, voice control technologies, etc.) are bringing new skillsets and jobs in Product Design. There will be some overlap but we’ll likely see a radical transformation in designers’ skills and missions. According to Dan, a new design world will emerge from these innovations.
“Not everything has to solve a problem”
Sometimes it’s just fun to make things. It can help you learn, help you grow, without solving any particular problem and that’s ok!
If you’ve got more questions for Dan, don’t hesitate to tweet him @Simplebits & follow his projects (like Advencherco) on his blog Simplebits.
Many thanks to dotCSS for putting us in touch with Dan 🙏 and a huge one to Zenly too for hosting us in their incredible offices and offering food & drink (and goodies)! You guys rock 🤩🙌
We also wanted to thank our design partners Muxu.Muxu for their work on our visual identity and the meetup’s live tweeting.
Big thank you to everyone who came out too! Be sure to follow us on Twitter and join our community to stay in the loop about the next meet-ups 👋
