April 7, 2010 say something

Dribbble is a designer’s delight

Dribbble

Dribbble is a finely crafted community for designers, by designers. It’s invite-only in order to maintain high quality work on the site, but that doesn’t mean you can’t browse around for inspiration. Give it enough time to fine-tune the tagging and search features (color search is already there; UI patterns, textures, etc. would be great) and we may have the most useful, A-grade design reference out there from people who know their stuff.

There are several things that set it apart from generic portfolio and gallery sites, as it is also dubbed the “Twitter for designers”. From the tagline “what are you working on?” to its system of “rebounds” (basically a response to a “shot”) to uploads of 400 pixels or less, Dribbble is focused on brevity and the right now even when they could have entertained the whole spectrum.

Of course there’s the basketball metaphor working all around too, which when expanded even further can create some interesting activities and interactions for the community: think games, collaborations, meetups, leagues, merits. Think social games like Foursquare and BarStar, only more productive.

People have been complaining about the quality of a lot of things in the design community lately, whether it’s resource articles or the actual interactions within the community, and I see Dribbble as a partial solution to that.

August 30, 2007 7 replies

Dress up your Tumblelog- 5 Designs to Inspire You

The tumblelog phenomenon is new enough that well-designed sites are still few and far between. Here are 5 unique designs that break out of the mold:

cameron.io

Well known for his Tumblr themes, Cameron makes nice use of color and different icons for each type of post:

cameronio1.jpg

topherchris

Great header:

topherchris.jpg

tumbl.us

Nice attention to detail in the wrap around images for the dates and the subtle gradient background:

tumblus1.jpg

Jacob Bijani

Another site with nice use of color for different post types, in a cool wrap-around ribbon design:

jacobbijani.jpg

Stumble Peach

A clean layout making good use of the sidebar and icons:

stumblepeach.jpg

For more info on tumblr theme customization and all things Tumblr, check out Tumblepedia and CustomizeTumblr. Tumblr also has a listing of basic elements that are available for customization on their site.

Incidentally, I mentioned last week that one of the features that is still forthcoming in Tumblr is comment functionality. CustomizeTumblr has posted two solutions to use in the meantime.

Looking for some free Tumblr themes?

There aren’t many to choose from, but hopefully we’ll see that changing. For now, check out Cameron’s excellent set of themes, the Bus Full of Hippies theme, Silkclean at pixelspread, two at the Nikography tumblelog, and Sunday Edition by Bill Israel.

This article was written by Randa Clay. Read more about design, marketing, blogging, branding and all things creative at RandaClay.com.

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