Regarding our recent site outage

It’s been a long night/morning for us here at Dribbble HQ. We profusely apologize for the downtime, and can’t thank you all enough for your patience while we get back on track. Last night at approximately 8pm EDT, our database server went belly up and we’ve been working non-stop since then to bring the site back up. 

Here’s what we know now, and what we’re doing to move forward:

• We had corruption in our database. The exact cause is unknown but our leading theory is that we experienced a memory corruption problem where a chunk of memory got wiped and replaced with zeros. We continue to investigate.
• This site is back up and running, but we’re a bit tentative as we are still unsure of the root cause of the problem. For the time being, we’re running much more frequent backups and working toward a more robust database architecture.
• We spent much of the night trying to salvage the latest data, but ultimately had to rollback to a backup copy of our database from roughly 2am EDT May 14, so most of the work that was posted yesterday has been lost. This pains us to no end are we are deeply sorry for that.
• We’ll be restoring lost data regarding pro accounts (orders and status) and looking to see what other information we can retrieve. If you went Pro yesterday, hang in there, we’ll get your status upgraded as soon as possible. Thank you for your continued patience as we work our way through this recovery. We’ll keep you updated as we step through this process.
• This episode has exposed a lot of flaws in our production architecture and our ability to react to crises and we’re going to work hard to correct them.

Thanks again for your understanding, patience and support. Rest assured, we’ll continue to do everything we can to keep Dribbble running smoothly again.

Site Outage

Around 8PM EDT this evening, Dribbble went down as the result of what appears to be some issues with database corruption. We’ve been working since then to resolve these issues, with the good folks at RubyTune assisting us.

We’re truly sorry for this downtime. As soon as we have progress to report, we’ll let you know.

Start-up Story: Paravel

by Susanna Baird

(We don’t want you mispronouncing in your head, so let’s start with a quick lesson: Pair-Uh-Vel. Pairuhvel. Paravel. Carry it with you.)

Before there was Paravel, there was Wimpkiller. 

Developer Dave Rupert co-founded the paper ‘zine in the late ’90s, naming it after a t-shirt he scored at Value Village. “Branding at its best,” he joked. 

As reams of 20th-century paper went pixel, so went Wimpkiller. Rupert, who runs Austin-based design shop Paravel with designer Reagan Ray and founder Trent Walton, turned the ‘zine into a blog into a blog network into a strange and happy hybrid that kept his friends connected and amused through the roaming years of their 20s.

The site’s growth followed Rupert’s interests. After identifying Wimpkiller’s next iteration, he figured out how to make it happen. “I learned the ropes of web development there … . I learned a lot about building a website, a community, and managing a long term project,” he told Dribbble. 

When Rupert moved to Japan to teach English, Wimpkiller allowed Walton to keep a bead on him. Walton had paid Rupert a bargain-basement, one-time fee of $85 to teach him “to do what he does.”

“We just kind of hacked it out long distance,” Rupert remembered. “Our working relationship’s really similar now.” The guys work from home and convene on Campfire, for lunch and weekly meetings, at family birthday parties, and for ATX Dribbble meetups, which they started in 2011. Last month’s meetup, during SXSW, attracted more than 400 attendees.

Consciously or through shared intuition, the trio’s working style echoes the Wimpkiller Model: make what you love and learn as you go. In upending the traditional order, in which skills are acquired and projects chosen based on skill set, Paravel has pursued a slew of well-heralded clientless-projects.* The unpaid work not only resulted in new open source products (FitText, FitVids), but also attracted a national following and a marquee client: Microsoft.

The three amigos, as the guys call themselves, started sharing orbits in high school, round about 1998. Ray dated a girl in Rupert’s crowd. Rupert toilet-papered Walton’s house when Walton skipped a fireworks outing. Walton road-tripped from Stephen F. Austin State U. in Nacogdoches to UT Austin, where Rupert and Ray roomed together. They shared a goofball sensibility, a proclivity to tinkering, and an eye for visual cool. 

After college, Ray and friends founded an ad firm, which earned a few years’ rent plus chicken wings. (Pluckers Wing Bar paid half its fee in Pluckers Bucks.) After Rupert returned from Japan, he and Ray worked for a Phoenix real estate company while hovering on the edge of a plummeting market.

“It didn’t end well,” Rupert said. They got let go, but also, they learned. “You get hacked by some kids in Russia or Iraq. Everything bad happens that can happen. … I learned all these hard lessons and it turned me into the de facto developer of our group,” Rupert said.

Walton was learning his own web-centric lessons at a family of industrial companies. “Every couple months, I built a website,” he recalled. “Every time I would get better and better.” He often looked to designer and Dribbble co-founder Dan Cederholm, whose SimpleBits was gaining attention for its work with Fast Company and such clients as ESPN and Odeo.

“I was basically ripping off everything SimpleBits had ever done,” Walton joked.

After Walton finished designing the companies’ sites, his employer had nothing but paper for him to tend. The fun of the job was the web; Walton went freelance and, admittedly without much thought, called himself Paravel, after C.S. Lewis’ Cair Paravel, home to Narnian royalty. 

Most good company yarns feature a crucial moment, marked by exquisite circumstance, little funding and much risk. Walton hired Rupert, then Ray, both professionally flummoxed and ready to jump into his web castle Paravel. They lived from paycheck to paycheck and they took every job.

Early gigs offered few thrills, but as is becoming a golden thread through this narrative, the trio learned. After a hectic stretch of noses-to-the-grindstone, earn-earn-earn, the team wanted something new. Something born not of skill-set or earning potential, but of passion.

Now, and not what happened two paragraphs up, comes the risk: the bill-less hour, the client-less project, the goal-less goal, the self-motivated, self-interested push towards a What lacking a clear How and How Much.

“We’re using 100 percent of our time to stay afloat,” Walton remembered. “Let’s start doing things that we like. … If you want to change the shape of the web, even in a tiny, minuscule way, you don’t build what’s possible, you build whatever you can imagine, which forces you into a situation where you’ve got to invent things.”

And so the amigos built good things they liked for nobody but themselves, figuring out the How as they went along. Their work style morphed. 

“Our process used to be, I would come up with something in Photoshop and hand it off to Dave to code,” Ray said. Now, “there’s not really a Point A, Point B, Point C. It’s Point B, Point A, Point C.”

They worked together and they shared their work at ParavelInc.com and on Dribbble and the people did hire them, wowed by such projects as The Many Faces Of. (See “Paravel’s Side Projects” at the end for list of Paravel’s side work.) “Things like that led to the kind of work we wanted to do,” Ray said. “We started getting clients we enjoyed working on.”

Such as 10K Apart. Typofonderie. The Do Lectures. Lost World’s Fair. And Microsoft.

Walton describes the first Microsoft conference call last year, just before the company hired Paravel to design the 17th version of the company’s website.

“This is me sitting in Texas on the phone trying not to sound dumb. I was equal parts eager for Paravel to be part of the job and amazed that we were even talking to them about doing the work.”

Walton may have felt in the dark, but a mighty spotlight shone down on him from Seattle, one highlighting his best features and aimed by web wizard Nishant Kothary, former Microsoft web strategist, cofounder of Minky, and Paravel evangelist.

Microsoft beta-launched IE9 back in 2010. To celebrate Web Open Font Format, Kothary commissioned designer Jason Santa Maria to create a series of font-astic posters called Lost World’s Fairs. Santa Maria brought in Walton, Walton brought in Rupert and Ray, the project pushed WOFF to its limits, and spawned Lettering.js. 

Kothary was impressed and invited Paravel to collaborate with him on 10K Apart, a contest challenging entrants to create responsive web apps using no more than 10 kilobytes, and on the site for Microsoft’s Build 2012 conference. He then gunned for them to redesign Microsoft.com, making it responsive. The move would make Microsoft the first big tech company to ship a fully responsive homepage.

“The Microsoft.com redesign not only needed an agency that lived on the bleeding edge of web development for the multi-device world, but one that was willing to collaborate in the true sense of the word,” Kothary told Dribbble. “Thanks to my repeated collaborations with Paravel, I was so certain that the three amigos fit the bill that I didn’t even provide the Microsoft.com team with a backup recommendation.”

From the outside looking in, the match-up appears to be that of David hired by Goliath to move man-sized boulders: different strengths, different approaches, different cultures. But Microsoft heralded a new forward focus with the launch of Windows 8 in 2012 and the introduction of an efficient, RWD-friendly design language (formerly known as Metro). 

Redmond was ready for Austin. Microsoft was ripe for Paravel. The three Texans could feel it when they arrived in Redmond.

“When we landed, their dev team, their engineering team, they were just ecstatic,” Rupert remembered. “They were ready to work hard and fast and build this, a nice product to show off the changes that are happening within Microsoft.” Plus, he added, while Microsoft was the expert on Microsoft, Paravel was the expert on RWD.

“We do RWD. That’s what they wanted. We have a clean, minimalist style and that fit with their Windows style design. We’re a three-man shop, so we are able to work fast and make decisions fast on our end, which helped them get to deciding points faster.”

That said, the three-man shop did make adjustments and surmount hurdles. Ray talked about shifting his view of the typical client interaction, where design teams work with one client contact. “This was more collaborative,” he said. “There were a lot of meetings, talking with various members of their team about what we wanted to do.” Walton discussed the increased design considerations when addressing multiple versions in many languages, some reading right-to-left, others left to right.

All three Paravellians bragged on their Microsoft cohorts: They possessed top-notch skills, a progressive and collaborative mentality, the ability to quickly grasp what needed to be done, and a deep understanding of the needs of its audiences — 98 worldwide. Walton admitted to growing verklempt on that final Microsoft phone call.

When the critics saw the design, they grew a little emotional, too.

“As far as corporate homepages go, this one is aces.”
—Alex Wilhelm, The Next Web

“If a designer is looking to convince a client to go with a state-of-the-art site design, they can now point in a surprising direction — to Microsoft.”
—Anthony Wing Koser, Forbes

“Really nice design work.”
—John Gruber, Daring Fireball

“It’s no Wimpkiller, but it’ll do.”
—Susanna Baird, Gotcha

The next obvious place to go with this article is Next. What’s Next for Paravel, now that they’ve scaled Microsoft? 

For starters, How and Who Next remains the same for the foreseeable future. 

“We’re not hiring,” said Rupert. “We enjoy being a three-person team. We work and it works and so far it’s worked and so why would we change it?”

The What remains to be seen; it’s on the three amigos collective mind, but in a musing, thoughtful, low-stress way. They enjoy client work, they enjoy their side projects, and while they’ve talked products, like everything else with these guys, those products need to be born of a passionate idea which, at present, remains to be thunk. Perhaps it’s the lack of sleep.

“We have this continuous office pregnancy,” Ray joked. “Jill and I had our baby [#1, 8-month-old Mary] and then Trent and Bonnie were pregnant [with Charlie, 3 months; Walton also has Henry, 2], and now Dave and his wife Jessie. Up until August, we’re going to have a year-and-a-half of continuous pregnancy.”

Whatever they do next, they’ll be doing it from Austin. The three amigos love their hometown, each singing its praises according to his own style. Walton’s Austin is “a pretty laid-back place.” 

Ray seconds the laid-back. “We were one of the first [places] to have a Dribbble meetup, and it’s always been — it’s a bar and we’re going to get together and hang out. … There’s a lot of neat stuff that inspires me.”

Channeling Jeff Spicoli, Rupert concurs.

“We have a low tolerance for bullshit. We’re all groove-dogs. We’re kind of a hippie culture at our roots.

“I think another factor is the heat … the 100 degrees. That’ll cook the douchebag right outta you.”

Neat, laid-back, inspiring, groove-dogging, without a touch of douche-baggery, Austin sounds a lot like the three amigos. And as they love their Austin, so too their Austin loves them. Phil Coffman, creative director at Element, describes the spot Paravel holds in the community.

“Paravel symbolizes the kind of company and success story that Austin loves: a small group of unpretentious locals doing the work they love and giving back to the community while doing it. 

“The Austin design scene looks to them as leaders.” 

—-

Paravel’s Side Projects

The Accessibility Project
Rupert helped launched the project, a community-drive effort to make web accessibility easier for front-end developers to implement. We want to make the web a better place, and make it simple. 

ATX Web Show 
Podcast about the Austin web community. Rupert: “This is near and dear to my heart. I love my city and I want it to be famous.”

Austin Town Hall
Indie music news from Austin. Ray: “It grew out of my relationship with my brother [Ryan Ray]. I was collaborating with him to create some kind of outlet to talk about music. … It was one of the first side projects, but also one of the first sites we worked on at all. It was great to … get something out there that was more of our personality.”

The Greatest Movies of All Time 
Screen-printed in Ray’s garage, the poster is based on the American Film Institute’s “Top 100” list (2007 version).

Heroes of Texas 
Posters by Texas designers commemorating the Texas Revolution, curated by Ray: “I wanted to make these posters. As I started working on them, I started thinking about how some of my colleagues would make them. I started asking them to do it.”

Littlefield
Ray: “Dave and I were making this fake movie. We were freshmen in college. Dave took Powerpoint and actually figured out how to make a movie trailer. It was all images and text animating. It was really hilarious. It was us breaking into a girls’ dorm.” Sundance calls, gentlemen!

Many Faces Of
Site commemorating the amigos’ love of the silver screen. Walton: “It’s one thing to read about a new technique and it’s an entirely different thing to launch anything, it doesn’t matter what it is. The Many Faces Of, we all love movies, particularly ’80s movies. Back then there was something delightful and amazing because of all the new CSS3 properties and web fonts … There’s something to be said for, build it and we’ll see what happens.”

ShopTalk Show
Live web podcast with Rupert and Chris Coyier. Rupert: “It’s just a sound effects podcast that also covers web design. … Most of the show is actually taking questions from people. You’re getting a chance to hearwhat people are struggling with and what people are interested in. I also enjoy hanging out.”

Signs of Austin
Ray’s illustrations of vintage signs. “ ustin has all these really cool neon, these old signs with all the lightbulbs in them from the ’50s and ’60s. All of these signs are slowly starting to disappear. I’ve been thinking about what Austin used to be.”

Wimpkiller
From paper ‘zine to blog to multi-blog platform to chat group to social network, Wimpkiller kept the amigos together. Rupert: “That blog was in my 20s, but all my friends in my 30s, all my closest, dearest friends, are byproducts of this. The site’s now defunct, but it’s kind of this testament of how this website brought us together.”

Timeout with Jory Raphael

by Samuel Fine

Timeouts are lightning-quick interviews. Five questions to help you get to know the players holding court at Dribbble. Many thanks to Jory for being today’s interviewee.

Who are you? Let us know where you hail from and what you do.

My name is Jory Raphael, and I’m a designer living and working in the beautiful state of Vermont. I have a lovely wife who is smarter than I’ll ever be and two kids who are following in her footsteps.

I run a small studio called Sensible World and design pretty much anything and everything, though I’m particulary fond of icons and logos. I’m also the guy responsible for all of the podcast artwork for 5by5 Broadcasting and the creator of Symbolicons, a lovely set of vector icons. 

What are you working on?

A lot! But the project I’m working on right now that makes me the proudest is Notabli, a startup I’ve co-founded with fellow Dribbbler and all-around nice guy Jackson Latka. I’m ridiculously excited about it. If you have young kids, you will be too. It’s a stylish and easy way for parents to chronicle and share moments in their kids’ lives. You can grab it on the App Store.

Choose a favorite shot of yours. Tell us why it’s a favorite.

I’m really enjoying how the latest icon set I’m creating is turning out. My goal is to make them work well at small sizes and be super friendly. I have a special place in my heart for the projects that I’ve taken on outside of traditional client work. I think side projects are incredibly important to have, especially for creatives. I’m self-taught as a designer, and even more so as an icon designer. Each set I create is a learning experience, so it’s fun to try new styles and techniques without the pressure of a deadline.

Tell us about your setup. What tools did you use to create the shot(s)? (e.g. hardware, software, pens, paper, blowtorch, etc.)

I recently relocated the HQ of Sensible World to Three West Collective, a co-working space in Burlington. It’s a great space and I’m surrounded by awesome designers and developers – which is a wonderful way to keep pushing yourself as a creative professional. I imagine my setup is fairly typical. 13” MacBook Air hooked to a cinema display. Mouse. Keyboard. Chair. Desk. William Shakespeare action figure. I have a similar setup at my home office (sans the William Shakespeare action figure). I live pretty much every day in Illustrator and Photoshop.

Choose a favorite shot from another player. Tell us why you dig it.

This is a tough one, as there are so many awesome shots to choose from on Dribbble, but one of my favorites would have to be the Vulture Badges by Matt Stevens. Matt is insanely talented and this project looked like a ton of fun. It’s the type of work I wish I could do, but doubt I’d have the skill to pull it off nearly as well as Matt did. Simple, iconic and well-executed.

Going Green: Ciara Panacchia

by Susanna Baird

Throughout this series, designers have talked us backwards through their shots, starting from the finish and deconstructing, explaining the process from Z to A. 

To show you our A to Z, we’re presenting our final article in its original form: The questions and the answers. No editing beyond the rare typo-fix. No googling. No snarky asides. (Well, maybe one or two.) 

Think of it like a mini documentary. “Going Green: Raw Cut.” Which sounds like a salad at our local organic cafe, but whatever. Cue the indie folk soundtrack. And 3 … 2 … 1 … 

Talk about the shot you’ve chosen to highlight. Come at it from whatever angle you’d like— tell us how you came up with the design, why this particular project excites you, what the client requested  — your call. 

The story that never was. 

The Set up:

I found out that swissmiss had featured my set “Things my 3 year old says” on her blog which in it self was just cool to me. I even did my happy dance, it’s the little things. That night I received an email from a major US children’s network about developing some characters for an app they were creating, they had seen my work on swissmiss. I actually squealed and walked around with a big stupid grin on my face for the night. I was unbearable to be around, “stupid happy” comes to mind.

Brief Cartoon Nerd History:

I am a big kid disguised in adult clothes, and having a 6-year-old amplifies that. I remember the days of Cow and Chicken, I am Weasel, Johnny Bravo, Dexter and DD and those were just my college years in Waterford IT, but I grew up on Bugs Bunny and Foghorn Leghorn etc. I saw Monsters, Inc. on a date with Kevin in London when it was first released, I even had my own Sully, which now resides in my parents house, in the attic that used to be my bedroom. Saturday mornings are still reserved for cartoon time. I didn’t care that the work may never see the light of day, I was just happy to get that email and the opportunity to submit work. 

The Brief:

With the work I had been doing for the TV show BB & Bella, it really helped when it came to developing these characters. The brief was to create a wizard, his pet dragon, and some minions as well as some sets. I went through several rounds of my own sketches, pulled together some mood boards and references for the art required. Once I was happy with the sketches I fleshed them out in Photoshop. It was unfortunate the project was shelved but the person I was in touch with was just incredible and followed up which is always nice.    

Tell us a little bit about Carlow (or what you miss most from home living in the US). Favorite hangout or public space or anything else you love and/or miss.

Carlow (Ceatharlach) is a small but beautiful town south of Dublin but north of Waterford in what we like to call in Ireland “The sunny south east,” yes we Irish have a strange sense of humor. Carlow has a megalithic rock, a castle that was half blown up because a doctor wanted to make more room for his patients, and a great art festival every year called Eigse. People come from all the over world to participate. If you ever had to take the train during the 1990’s, there was a train conductor who once we got to Carlow would just mercilessly drag out the sound of the name “Ceaaarrrlllooowww” it got to a point that I thought they would end up recording his voice so that for all eternity when they stopped at the train station people would hear it. Kevin still says it every time we have to take the train there.

I grew up in a B&B, which as you can imagine was always interesting, so every time we go home at least there is a room for us and a great Irish breakfast, blood pudding and all. I miss the slower pace of life, the food, being able to stroll through town and politely nod at the people I know. It is just a really big version of “Cheers.” All of Eliana’s cousins are there but we FaceTime and the girls go through their rooms showing off their dolls. Eliana understands that mum talks funny and my dad had her convinced if she ate the Irish cheese she would sound more like her mum … she didn’t fancy that at all. St. Patrick’s day in Ireland for me used to be Church > Parade > Pub but not necessarily in that order. 

Will you do anything special this St. Patrick’s Day? If so, what?

After buying all the soda bread I can find in Jewel and all the Barry’s tea that’s on sale, we will probably go to Naperville and celebrate with the West Suburban Irish community that host the parade there. The only time you will see a Storm Trooper in a kilt. After that we will probably hit up Quigley’s Pub (if we can get in the door) for some fish and chips. Again it’s the little things. I’ll FaceTime with my family and feel a little sad not to be home. It is a big ol’ party weekend for the Chi-rish. So long as we are with family and friends, all is well with my world.

Finally, choose another Dribbbler whose work you admire, and tell us why.

Just so you know this question is sucktastic. [Ed. Note: Clearly we’re not editing. She just called our question sucktastic, and we let it stand. Raw, people. Raw.] I follow some really stellar people on Dribbble that  vary in style, form and technique. I really struggled with this, ‘cause there is Dave Mottram, Rogie, Jeremey Holmes, Adam Grason, Steve Simpson, Shawna x, Pam Wishbow, Mc Baldassari, Jennifer Lucey-Brzoza and Claire Coullon. They all rock, but Dave won for 3 reasons. 1. It is his birthday weekend. [Ed. Note: Happy Birthday Dave!] 2. He was the person that drafted me. THANKS DAVE. [Ed. Note: Nice work, Dave!] 3. Have you seen his work??? Speaks for itself. [Ed. Note: Grackles and Monkeys and Pugs, Oh My!]

I follow Dave on almost every social media platform. He has a beautiful clean style with a lot of texture and warmth in his pieces. I am always in awe of his daily sketches and his colored illustrations are always so charming and endearing. They make me smile. This piece “Catching Bugs” has a little Mary Blair flair to it, which I love. 

And for confirmation/input: Ciara Panacchia originally from Carlow, where she met her husband Kevin originally from Burbank, IL, whom she spotted in a crowd holding a camera during a festival in the town, currently living in Warrenville, IL with their daughter Eliana. Illustrator, designer, and creator of the Elie’s Books series introducing children to basic words in Irish, English, French and Spanish. Illustrating a TV series with Igloo Films for release in May 2013. 

Found working online at ciaracreative.com, tweeting online @ciarasworld. 

So that was A. We take A and move it around, nipping, tucking, stitching ‘til we arrive at Z. But you know what? This reads pretty charming as is. We’re going to leave it. Because we’re the editor. And we can. 

Thanks for reading! Cue credits.

Dribbble and United Pixelworkers present: The Brackets

by Samuel Fine

Are you crazy about March hoops? Does the NCAA Championship drive you insane? Positively loony about spring basketball?

Confusing, thinly-veiled references to a registered trademark aside, if you’re excited about the NCAA Championship tournament, get ready to get even more excited because we’re teaming up with the hard-working Pittsburghers at United Pixelworkers for a bracket mega-contest we’re calling, appropriately, The Brackets!

(If you’re not familiar with the NCAA Championship or the bracket tradition, check out this article on Wikipedia for details on how it usually works.)

Joining the contest is easy:

1. Download Simple Bracket for iPhone and fill out your tournament bracket.
2. Join the DribbbleUP pool using the PIN ‘2013’ before the tournament starts on March 21.
3. Sit back and relax, because you’re already done.

When the tournament ends on April 8, the insightful entrants with the highest-scoring brackets will win some very cool prizes, including an iPad Mini for the grand prize winner, and the top 10 finishers will get assorted goodies from us, United Pixelworkers, and our wonderful sponsors Shopify and Studio Neat, creators of Simple Bracket!

Check out the official site, thebrackets.co, for details and contest rules. Good luck, and go Michigan!

Going Green: Alan Geraghty

by Susanna Baird

Seizing St. Patrick’s Day as a green-and-gold opportunity, we’ve been profiling a few Irish and Ireland-based Dribbblers over the last week.

We didn’t expect the surfing. 

When we started this series, we hoped for lyrical odes and we got them. Many fit our cliched dreams of the Emerald Isle. Designers have praised Ireland’s green hills, cobbled streets, vibrant art and music scenes, and local pubs. Alan Geraghty, AKA Tiger Pixel, is the first to tout the waves.

“Galway’s a big college town so it has a real vitality to it all year round,” he told Dribbble. 

Energy. College students. We like it. 

“It’s a great town for the lively arts, with a strong focus on music and theater. Many a poet wanders its cobbled streets.” 

We’ve heard that about the arts. We like the poet bit. Makes it more specific. Gives us something to look at in our mind’s eye. 

“It’s also got some of the sweetest surf breaks in the country.”

Wait, what? Now you’re smashing our stereotyped notions to bits! 

Mad googling reveals that Ireland is in fact the new hot place to head for wave-catching. Irish surfer Ollie O’Flaherty bragged on Irish surfing to the BBC last April, after he was nominated for a Billabong XXL Big Wave Award.

“To be brutally honest the best waves I’ve ever seen or surfed have been in Ireland, by a long way. It might not be good all the time but when it is good, it’s better than anywhere else in the world,” O’Flaherty said.

Like his surfing countryman, Geraghty’s got waves on the brain. Past work has appeared in the New York Times and The Guardian, but more recently he designed a logo for a new push notification platform called Element Wave. Element Software, Geraghty’s employer, will launch the platform in the next month.

“We wanted to avoid an oceanic vibe for the logo so I decided to go with a single sinusoidal wave. More of an emphasis on science than surf,” he explained. “I think it’s pretty eye catching and is quite versatile for using with different colors. I used a blue metallic effect for the Dribbble shot to make it appear a little more vibrant.”

“Eye-catching” and “vibrant” also apply to Macnas, a Galway-based troupe of artists that specializes in fantastical, processional spectacle. U2 fans might remember them from the band’s Zooropa tour. Geraghty had planned to catch the group’s St. Patrick’s Day parade. “It’s always a trippy experience,” he said. 

Unfortunately, the group was elsewheres (plural: Limerick, Cork, Moscow, Sydney, Brisbane!), so Geraghty caught the city parade and met up with some college buddies by the Spanish Arch.

This has turned out to be quite the Renaissance interview: college town, wandering poets, cobbled streets, sweet surfing, sinusoidal waves, new products, shattered stereotypes, psychedelic Paddy’s parades, 16th century arch. 

Anything else sir? What’s that? Add a “like all” button to Dribbble accounts? At least one, Geraghty suggests. Louie Mantia.

“The quality of his work is simply incredible and the comment sections for his shots are always amusing!”

Geraghty can be found online at cargocollective.com/tigerpixel and on Twitter, sporadically, @tigerpixel.

Going Green: Paddy Donnelly

by Susanna Baird

Seizing St. Patrick’s Day as a green-and-gold opportunity, we’ve been profiling a few Irish and Ireland-based Dribbblers over the last week.

The bunny rabbit wears scuba gear and drives a submarine that looks like a killer whale. Make that a submarine that looks like a killer whale sporting a shark’s tail. With a starry pink top. Festooned with a periscope. 

The submarine careens down a rickety wooden slide resembling the downhill on an old Coney Island roller coaster, then dives deep. The bunny steers the sub towards fish and jewels, earning stars and trying his damndest to avoid floating green barrels and grey spiked balls akin to those topping medieval mace. 

The game is Wee Subs, the second offering from Wee Taps, AKA Dribbbler Paddy Donnelly and iOS developer Alain Hufkens. In it, players design their own sub and embark upon a deep-sea adventure. Reviewers rave.

We’re not underwater experts, so we need apps for deep diving, like Wee Subs. It’s perfect for filling in the gaps when it comes to what’s under the sea. — iPad Kids 

Wee Subs is a beautiful digital toy that I would gladly recommend to any parent who wants to encourage their juniors to play and have fun. — Geeks With Juniors

Wee Subs is delightful to play with, and inspires young children to use their imagination and create in a way that seems to delight and entertain.   — #fourlittletesters

Co-creator Donnelly, originally from the seaside town of Ballycastle (County Antrim, Northern Ireland) and now based in Belgium, chose to share a shot from Wee Subs, his second game, because of what the experience meant to him.

“This one in particular has great significance because it showed me that our first game, Wee Rockets, wasn’t just a fluke or a one-off,” he told Dribbble. “Seeing our second app make it to the App Store showed us a lot about our capabilities and that we had something special.

“There’s no better feeling than working on your own products and knowing that people enjoy them.”

That good feeling, working on your own products, motivated Donnelly to leave his job at Nascom and go solo about a year ago. Today he works at his own shop, lefft.com, as an illustrator and UX designer. He travels to conferences like New Adventures (Nottingham, UK) and Build (Belfast) to catch up with his web pals, scattered around Ireland and the UK.

Donnelly has discovered a bit of an Irish contingent in Belgium, and expects they’ll wind up at the local Irish pub today. While the Guinness that flows outside Ireland is never as good as the Guinness at home, the Belgians know a thing or two about beer. Donnelly expects the taps’ll keep him happy.

Donnelly and every other designer in this series squirmed when asked to pick a favorite designer. “But we love them all,” they protested, to a one. After submitting the now-familiar refrain, Donnelly let his numbers do the talking.

“Looking at my stats page, it’s clear that I’ve delivered the most likes to Dan Matutina’s incredible shots,” he said. “His stunning style is so unique that you can spot his work a mile away. Seeing the continuous stream of great work coming from Dan has been a strong motivator for me to keep shipping my design work.”

One more thing. Related to no other thing. Still, worth a mention. Paddy Donnelly wishes Pluto was still a planet.

Donnelly can be found online at lefft.com and at weetaps.com, and on Twitter @paddydonnelly.

Going Green: Meagan Hyland

by Susanna Baird

Seizing St. Patrick’s Day as a green-and-gold opportunity, we’ll be profiling a few Irish and Ireland-based Dribbblers over the next week.

Type is the best supporting actor of design; letterforms and typography are subtle, powerful players crucial to a project’s success, but often underestimated by an uneducated audience. In her weekly poster series Meagan’s Movie Alphabet, designer, illustrator, and hand-letterer Meagan Hyland promotes typography to the level of marquee actor. 

In the series, which she started a year ago “to create a fun brief with no client to please but myself,” Hyland designs wonderfully conceived letters to convey a movie’s narrative soul. Take “A is for Across the Universe,” the first letter in Hyland’s cinematic primer.

Beatles music propels the plot of the 2007 Oscar-nominated romantic drama, about star-crossed lovers (Hey) Jude and Lucy (in the Sky with Diamonds), played by Jim Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood. 

“The design itself is a play on one of the key motifs from the movie … which is a big painted strawberry,” Hyland told Dribbble. “It is still one of my favorite letters because once I had the design, I thought, ‘well, it would be silly to do just one.’”

Thank goodness for the letter A. Hyland’s series has garnered her acclaim from the likes of Glamour and Flavorwire, and has become an important component of Hyland’s creative work.

Not surprisingly, Hyland goes typographic when naming a Dribbble favorite: Friends of Type, a group of US-based designers who post daily lettering exercises to an online sketchbook. “Working with type a lot, I always find their work exciting to see develop,” Hyland said.

When not alphabetizing, Hyland works as a graphic designer at Dublin-based Catalysto. Originally from Kildare, about 60km/35mi from Dublin, Hyland has found her own favorite haunts in the capital city, on the Southside: “Watching old movies in the IFI [Irish Film Institute], people watching in St. Stephen’s Green [a Victorian-era public park], and rummaging for records on Wicklow Street.

“Dublin is a great city for finding new music and art, and there is always a pop-up gallery or a gig somewhere in the city.”

As for St. Paddy’s, Hyland’s “keeping it simple with pints and the parade with my friends from art school in Limerick.”

Hyland can be found online at meaganhyland.com and meagansmoviealphabet.tumblr.com, and on Twitter @meaganhyland.

Going Green: Darren Geraghty

by Susanna Baird

Seizing St. Patrick’s Day as a green-and-gold opportunity, we’ll be profiling a few Irish and Ireland-based Dribbblers over the next week.

A smart designer talking design is like a great professor delivering a lecture. Listen in on Darren Geraghty. When the UX designer at Dublin-based Boxever had the opportunity to develop an identity for the Computer and Communications Museum of Ireland, he took it. 

“It’s an exciting prospect to be tasked with capturing the essence of a project through a simple mark, and also a welcome break from thinking about product-oriented problems,” Geraghty told Dribbble. 

The assignment: represent not only the museum’s mission, but also its roots.

“The mark is composed using the binary elements of digital communication, namely 1 and 0, which are rotated to echo the form of a vintage computer,” he explained. “A Celtic triskele, or spiral, is set within the ‘screen’ to represent the Irish heritage of the museum itself.”

Like a seasoned professor, Geraghty moved from the up-close explanation to the big-picture summation.

“I liken the process of designing a logo to a sculpture, in that you begin with a large block of ideas and input, then gradually pare away the unnecessary until you’re left with the essential. I’m very happy with the simplicity and meaning which the design conveys, and thankfully so was the board of the museum!”

When he looks to other designers, Geraghty particularly admires those who tackle entire projects, from concept through branding and icon design, all the way to interface. Like everyone we’ve asked, he’s hesitant to pick just one–“fact is, my fav designer changes quite a lot”–but okay, Alex Penny. 

“I have been admiring this guy’s work, and it’s a good example of the kind of designer I follow: logo, web, UI,” he said. “I appreciate the style and multidisciplinary approach.”

Geraghty lives in Shrule (County Mayo) in the west of Ireland, replete with picturesque mountains and lakes offering opportunities for unwinding. He’s also close enough to both Galway and Dublin to get into both on a regular basis, for everything from rugby and soccer (Go Ireland!) to concerts and art exhibitions. The day he corresponded with Dribbble, Geraghty was headed to a Galway gig by the Villagers, an Irish indie rock band that released their much-anticipated second-album Awayland a few months back.

Like Sheena Oosten, Geraghty lives in the vicinity of Ireland’s holy mountain, Croagh Patrick. Unlike Oosten, Geraghty won’t be hiking “Patrick’s Stack” this year, though he’s done it in the past. More likely, he’ll catch the parade in Galway, “always an amazing spectacle. Afterwards it’s on to listen to some traditional Irish music, catch up with old friends, enjoy a pint of Guinness or two, and soak up some of the wonderful atmosphere of the day.”

Geraghty can be found online at darrengeraghty.com and on Twitter @darrengeraghty.