Dribbble - A Designer’s Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Dribbble - A Designer’s Twitter

dribbble.com

55 pointstortilla17 comments

One of the cool things about twitter is that you don't need headlines, thumbnails, or previews. A tweet is one complete thought.

If you're going to arbitrarily restrict the images to a small size, it doesn't make sense to then use a slightly smaller size as a preview and put each "large" on its own page. If you want to enforce simplicity, make full use of the simplicity.

"There is no sign up for Dribbble at this time. Membership is entirely driven by our users - all members of Dribbble have been drafted (invited) by other members."

So it's not really the same as Twitter, it's more of an elite collection of select designers showing you pretty stuff. Similar to the way design blogs and their aggregators work now, but this gives it more of an "exclusive, members-only" feel.

That said, there's some good design work to be seen. If you're a designer, you should have most of these designers' feeds in your reader of choice already (I'm already following most of the designers I saw listed).

This is the best thing to come out of twitter yet.

EDIT: Will trade beer for an invitation ;)

lol, where should I ship it? :)

To the address in my profile :)

I agree. I'll trade beer (or similar) for an invite too. Email is in the profile.

I've been a member of a few invite only communities over the years and I think there is value to be had with the model (eg ancient facebook). Inevitably though the community grows and some other strategy needs to be chosen. Maybe with a community as small as web designers and devs though - this strat is sustainable.

I'm not a designer, but I have to create basically all the website designs for work, plus my own projects and I found the website-tag rss feed pretty inspiring. Only takes a few minutes out of your day but gives you some cool ideas and insight.

http://dribbble.com/tags/website.rss

They are doing something kind of similar to what we're doing at Forrst (http://forrst.com) for developers (and designers, too.)

It is an amazing community to watch. Design leaves a lot on the cutting room floor, and in dribbble you see both final products and bits of glory that may have never been appreciated or reviewed.

I hope they open up some parts of the site for others to see. Some very fresh work going on by some of the best designers in the world, sharing openly, participating freely and having a damn good time doing so.

Very nice concept. I think you need to spend some time working on the UX. The flow to get me to know what is going on could use some work (also to get me to wanting to sign up).

Cool name too. I'd even recommend calling it Dribbbbbbbbble, so I have to bookmark it.

The RSS feed is buried and the site is invite-only. Two major failures for an otherwise decent idea.

The current community would most likely say "invite-only" is a feature not a failure.

Dan made the executive decision to open the site up to viewing by the general public against the wishes of a lot of the members.

Community quality is an issue that most sites just try to ignore. When someone tries something different to relative success -- invites are extremely hard to come by and current members are very active -- rushing to call it a failure is short-sighted.

Or, it's his opinion. He didn't say the site was a failure, just that from his perspective, those are two things that make this site not worthy of further attention.

I waffled a bit on my opinion of this site, but the best way to categorize the site is to think of it like a design aggregator. The aggregation is a bit more focused and driven by the members, which effectively weeds out the general crap you'd find on any other free-for-all design site. By this metric, signal-to-noise is extremely high, and the site is a success.

However, the elitist vibe that this whole site creates doesn't sit well with me. I hated that crap in high school, and my feelings haven't changed much on that in the intervening 20 years. Dan and his community can keep the site private. I didn't start designing to win popularity contests. This, to me, is also a failure of the site.

Also, realize where this is being posted. Most news here concerns start-up businesses. If you have no profitability, and are a communal-invite-only image posting site, it sounds like it will be a failure. As a pet project, I'm sure it can sustain itself indefinitely.

Aside from all that, I do like the site on its technical merit alone. Somebody create a site that does the same thing, but is open to the public. 120,000 pixels, a way to screen grab easily, and a REGISTRATION PROCESS. I'll sign up.

The "All-Stars" list looks a lot like my "you are following" on Twitter.

Image a twitter for composers.

The intentionally misspelled name could be a challenge to new users as it may be confusing.

Also, when I hear the word "dribble" I think of pee, preventing me from taking the site seriously.

Just my two cents.

Most people connect that word with basketball.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com