Dribbble Blog

For the past year, we’ve sold our own advertising on Dribbble. It put food on the table as we became a company, was a tremendous learning experience, and allowed us to work with some fantastic, like-minded companies, helping them gain exposure in front of the community. But it was also a tremendous amount of work. Our tiny team would prefer to focus on efforts that directly affect the app and the community.

Toward that end, we’re pleased to announce that starting June 1, Dribbble will be joining The Deck: the premiere ad network of creative, web and design culture. This will free us up to focus on Dribbble itself, while still serving high-quality, relevant ads to the community. Going forward, if you’d like to advertise on Dribbble, contact the friendly folks over at The Deck. Your ad will also appear on dozens of other wonderful sites.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank anyone who’s ever advertised on Dribbble. It’s because of you that we’ve been able to bootstrap Dribbble and continue to grow the community. We will forever be grateful for that.

Wanted to note that we made a fix to our Pro stats for 30-day counts of shot views. Due to a bug in our SQL, we’ve been omitting views/clicks that come from anonymous (non-Dribbble) users in these counts. Thus we’ve been underreporting the 30-day shot views numbers. (By how much depends on what percentage of a user’s views/clicks come from Dribbblers.)

We’ve made the fix and re-aggregated these stats. So if you notice an increase in the numbers, that’s why.

We sincerely apologize for the error.

Many thanks to Alden Haley (http://dribbble.com/aldenhaley) for reporting the bug so we could fix it.

We’re super excited today to announce the release of Dribbble Pro, a suite of extra features for existing players for just $19 USD per year.

In an earlier blog post, we outlined a roadmap for the future, noting that our next challenge was sustainability—adding revenue to keep up with the growth of the site. Dribbble Pro is our first step in that direction. We’ve left the core Dribbble experience free, while adding some powerful new functionality for those who’d like to get more out of the site and support our efforts to maintain the community.

To see the new Pro features in action, check out the screencast below. The short version is:

• Projects. Organize your shots into projects to tell the story and show the progression of your work.
• Advanced Stats. Keep track of your popular shots, traffic, clicks and fans—all in one spot.
• Attachments. Upload full-size images, PSDs, .zips, etc with your shots to provide greater detail.
• Pro Badge. Show your support for the community. We also won’t show ads on your main profile page.

If you’re a Dribbble player, head over to your Account and look for the Pro tab for details and sign up. We can’t wait to see how the community takes advantage of the new features!

As for prospects, we hope that revenue generated by Pro accounts will allow us to accelerate our efforts to evolve gracefully and accommodate more players - thank you for bearing with our growing pains.

Pro or no, we want to close by saying thanks to the entire Dribbble community. Your work and your support continue to be astonishing.

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

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

What are you working on?

We just launched a new site for The Do Lectures, working alongside Frank Chimero, Jon Heslop, and the rest of The Do Lectures Team. Being a part of this redesign was a privilege. They’ve got some great content, trusted our vision, and let us run wild with media queries.

We’ve also got a few in-house projects cooking. Goodfoot, a Gowalla-powered companion iPhone app, is open for beta testers, and the next The Many Faces Of subject has been nailed down.

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

I think it’d have to be Ford—the first in my car logo/badge series. When projects we work on tend to span months, it’s nice to sit down and hammer something out as a quick exercise. I take advantage of Dribbble in that way. It can be a nice outlet in and of itself.

Tell us about your setup. What tools did you use to create the shot(s)?

I just upgraded! I moved from a 15” MacBook Pro to a 27” iMac and a 13” MacBook Air, both with solid state drives. No more waiting on anything when I save for web, or anything else for that matter. I use Dropbox to share files between the two machines, and with the rest of the Paravel team. Oh, and the biggest upgrade of all would be represented by the baby monitor next to the mouse. I’ve got a 10 week old son, and am loving life.

My workflow for the Ford shot is pretty typical. I sourced a photo from a 1954 Mainline, created the lettering in Illustrator, and brought it into Photoshop for texture. Next to Coda and CSS Edit, Photoshop is where I spend most of my time.

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

Sorry, I’ve got 3. I can’t help myself.  Firstly, I’ll have to go back to January 2010 and cite something that I’d never even know how to begin to create. John Neiner’s Dreams In The Night writes its own story, and does way more with it’s pixel-space than any other shot I’ve seen.

Another would have to be ‘Lane Final’, yet another of Anthony Lane’s sturdy shots.

“Drawn with Sharpie, scanned, printed, re-drawn with Sharpie, scanned into and finally fleshed out in AI with live-trace and additional tweaking.”

What more could you possibly want? :)

And I’ll take Reagan Ray’s TMFO Logo as my sentimental third.

We were just getting our feet wet on The Many Faces Of there. What an exciting time.

Timeouts are lightning-quick interviews. Five questions to help you get to know the players holding court at Dribbble. We’ll be featuring a different player on a (hopefully) regular basis here on the blog. Many thanks to Rogie (pronounced RAH-GEE just FYI) for being the inaugural interviewee.

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

I’m a former Math/Computer Science double major with hopes to be a video game developer, with previous hopes to be a Disney animator, turned designer, illustrator and front end coder. I love what I do and you can find me frolicking around the internet, mostly on Dribbble and Twitter (@rogie).

What are you working on?

I’m wrapping up a long-time-coming redesign of Mad Mimi, dubbed “Mimi 2” that is not only an overhaul of their front-end site, but almost every tool in the system.

I’m also working on finishing up icon sets for my upcoming store, Fine Goods, a Mac OS X app for Flexibits and practicing my hand at becoming a better illustrator, which was a childhood dream of mine.

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

That would have to be “Filled Again” — for many reasons. I designed it as therapy during a hard time last year, where my mother was going through a really rough season. Design (illustration especially) is great therapy for me.

This shot represents parts of my life in its reference to video games (Zelda heart piece) and my desire to be filled with God’s holy spirit at all times. It’s also a hail back to the style that I used when I first started illustrating with a computer for my website, Komodo Media.

Tell us about your setup. What tools did you use to create the shot(s)?

My setup is pretty simple. 15” MacBook Pro, 24” Apple LED Monitor, Logitech MX Revolution Mouse, Big ‘ol fat Logitech G35 Headset (noise block for the kids ;)

I work solely in Adobe Fireworks CS5, with a side of elbow grease and an obsession for pixel perfection: hopefully one day I’ll get those dang pixels perfect :) For illustrations, I sketch, then scan, then rework the illustration with vectors. I’m slowly getting into Illustrator more and more.

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

My gosh. I literally spent two hours from midnight to 2am to go through over 3K of my favorites. First of all, I battled between the Steinway Metronome App by Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain and the the Captain Crunch illustration by Matt Kaufenberg, but for the #1 spot, I’m gonna give it to Matt.

Matt’s illustrations are so incredibly rich, gorgeous and full of character. To me, more than a perfectly executed user interface or pixel perfect icons, character is the most important part of anything (to me personally). Of course, being usable, being a good design to solve a problem, etc are all needed.

But Matt’s illustrations make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. They make me smile a huge grin. Every time I see his work, I want to become a better illustrator. Cheers Matt. You inspire me.

April 1st is just around the corner and we have some limited space still available for advertising. Our traffic and community continue to grow (12M+ impressions served last month) and with prices starting at $295 for a monthly spot, it’s a fantastic way to promote your business to our vibrant creative community. Visit dribbble.com/site/advertise or contact [at] dribbble dot com for more info.

Astute dribbblers may have noticed a few subtle updates to the UI that went live over the weekend. While on the surface the changes might seem tiny or easily unnoticed, the release had a gigantic amount under the covers that we’re currently testing privately. This will pave the way for an exciting announcement soonish.

One notable feature that’s up and running for everyone right now is the addition of a bio. Dribbble members can add a short description about who they are in their account settings. This will show up on their profiles. So do tell us about yourselves!

We’d like to issue some invitations this month! Before doing so, it’s worth noting a small change to the way invitations work. We’ve added an expiration date to invitations (currently 30 days from the date an invitation is sent). Once an invitation has expired, it can no longer be used to sign up and will be restored to the sender.

One of our most common requests is from folks who would like to give unclaimed invitations to someone else. While we don’t want invitations to be rescinded without notice, we hope that having an expiration date will provide a graceful way to let members put unused invitations to good use.

Toward that end: In one week (March 10), we’re going to start expiring any invitations that are over 30 days old. As always, you can see the status of all your invitations on the Account / Invitations page.

We wanted to take a moment to talk about our road map for the future. But first, a little history …

When we started this endeavor as a side project, we thought Dribbble might hold interest to a small niche community. Upon emerging from our beta 8 months ago, we (and our servers) were floored by the response. The niche was bigger than we thought. We quickly saw potential to create something significant, and perhaps even make a living doing it. The Dream! The timing was right (or as right as it would ever be with families involved), so Rich came on board full-time. We didn’t have enough revenue for the long haul, but hoped we could survive on ads and savings as we attempted to evolve Dribbble from hobby to business.

We’ve covered a lot of ground since then: Debuts, an API, Highlights, Playoffs and contests, vanity urls, Sign in with Twitter, Spectators, and countless incremental improvements. Behind the scenes, we’ve also sunk a lot of time into scaling and infrastructure, marketing, management and recruitment of advertisers, and user support.

Over the next few months, we’re concentrating on sustainability. We want Dan to come on full-time. We want Rich to make a full salary. We want to spend less time surviving and more time on features. We want to buy ourselves the breathing room and resources to do Dribbble justice.

How? Based on popular demand from members, fans and employers, we’ll offer Pro features for those who want their work to get more exposure.

We get countless reports via blog, Twitter, email and word of mouth that Dribbblers are getting discovered and hired via the site. This one is an interesting read:

http://justcreativedesign.com/2010/10/21/how-i-got-a-job-using-dribbble

We’re making the process even easier. Dribbblers for hire will be able to announce their availability and expertise, be found by location, and have a simple mechanism for being contacted.

We’re also creating a back channel (perhaps a Backboard) where Dribbblers can

Find great jobs

•  http://dribbble.com/shots/58060-H-FJ-is-hiring
•  http://dribbble.com/shots/64906-Work-at-Kickstarter
•  http://dribbble.com/shots/52395-Gowalla-is-hiring
•  http://dribbble.com/shots/46672-Work-with-Squared-Eye

and promote their …

Icons

• http://dribbble.com/shots/27458-Sweet-Social-Media-Icons
• http://dribbble.com/shots/77356-Icons-for-you
• http://dribbble.com/shots/97594-Twitterrific-for-Mac-Icons
• http://dribbble.com/shots/84889-Symbolicons-Update-Sneak-Peek

Fonts

• http://dribbble.com/shots/41807-Caballeros
• http://dribbble.com/shots/76982-Matchbook-font
• http://dribbble.com/shots/27698-Dekar-Free-font
• http://dribbble.com/chank

Prints

• http://dribbble.com/shots/44046-City-Set
• http://dribbble.com/shots/18865-Rhino-Printed
• http://dribbble.com/shots/31321-Chaos-Prints 

iOS apps

• http://dribbble.com/shots/97514-Tea-for-iOS-UI
• http://dribbble.com/shots/99416-New-Categories
• http://dribbble.com/shots/98066-Target-iOS-App-Icon
• http://dribbble.com/shots/60524-I-love-mobile-design-iPhone-iOS-app-interface-UI-UX

Games

• http://dribbble.com/shots/82862-Mini-Vacui-2
•  http://dribbble.com/shots/70372-Jacques-the-Astronut
• http://dribbble.com/shots/39487-Bzoonkbar-Game-Screen
• http://dribbble.com/shots/76730-Game-Map

Software

• http://dribbble.com/shots/14379-Profile
• http://dribbble.com/shots/6973-Passport
• http://dribbble.com/shots/82773-Mountee-Icon
• http://dribbble.com/shots/85379-Verifying

Conferences

• http://dribbble.com/shots/11279-jQuery-Conference-Site
• http://dribbble.com/shots/58800-Future-of-Web-Apps
• http://dribbble.com/shots/54570-Valio-Con-2011
• http://dribbble.com/shots/76519-220-Conferences-Site

As you can see, members have used the site creatively to show their wares. We’re creating a dedicated space for those who want a more targeted spotlight. We will not upset the core Dribbble experience. Dribbble will continue to look and work as it does today and it won’t cost a thing.

We mention all of this because the tweets, emails and other requests for support, features, API additions, etc have reached a fever pitch. This is great - we know we’re on to something. But in order to meet the demand, we need stability, resources and the luxury of being able to focus on progress. Sustainability.

We’ll definitely be fixing bugs and squeezing in core improvements along the way. But if we don’t expand the API or get to your favorite feature request for a while, it’s not because we don’t want to. We’re laying the groundwork for Dribbble to endure.

We hope we’ve earned your confidence that what we’re building is a tasteful addition to the current site. But the proof is in the pudding. So it’s time to go make the pudding. Perhaps we’ll even share some screenshots of our progress along the way. If only there were a site for that …

Social media star and dribbler (only two b’s?!) Shaquille O’Neal informs us as @the_real_shaq that he’s very “quotatious.” (His word—note the quotatious marks.) Following in his giant footsteps, Dribbble will soon be very … Spectatious.

We’ll be opening up the site in waves to anyone with a Twitter account who wants to follow the action more closely: Spectators.

The two most common questions we receive at Dribbble HQ are:

1. I don’t want to post shots, but how can I follow my favorite players and like/bookmark their shots?
2. I want to be a player, but I don’t know anyone with an invitation. How do I get drafted?

Admittedly, we haven’t had great answers to these queries. There is more work to do and fine lines between openness and focus to walk, but we hope that our answers are improving. Here’s a glimpse at how spectators will change the game …

1. For those who want to watch and cheer:

   Anyone with a Twitter account will be able to sign up as a spectator and do just that—follow their favorite players and like their favorite shots. You’ll have courtside seats to watch the creative web being built by the best players in the game.

2. For those who want to be a player:

   After signing up as a spectator, if you want to post shots you can declare yourself eligible for the draft by becoming a Prospect (in your account settings). Those who do will appear on a list of prospects along with their web sites. We hope this assists by providing a central place where members with invitations can browse prospective players and draft them with the click of a button. Prospects will be ordered by follower count, so if you don’t have invitations but would like to see someone become a Player, be sure to follow them. This serves as a voucher/recommendation to the community on behalf of the prospect. And you’ll be following them if and when they do get drafted!

We’ll be welcoming spectators in waves, i.e. we’ll open sign up for a bit, take stock and address any bugs or issues that arise, and repeat. We’ve done a lot of planning and preparation, but we also know there will be bumps in the road—this is a big change for Dribbble. Adding spectators in waves will also help us scale as we grow the user base by perhaps an order of magnitude. (Or two?) We know that many of you have waited for a LONG time to sign up, but please remember—we’re very small and on a tight budget. Hardware and storage is relatively cheap in this day and age; but we’re bootstrapping a sizable and active community, so it’s still pricey for us. We’ll do our best, but please be patient as we react to growth.

Our hope is that spectator sign up will be permanently open to anyone. Demand, issues of community and scale and, of course, the basketball gods will determine how long it takes us to get there.

Heads up players: With many new followers entering the community, remember you can toggle email notifications in your account settings.

Welcome, spectators! We’re eager to usher you into the arena. Look for us to open the gates to spectator sign up very … soonish.

With 161 rebounds in just 1 hour, the Holiday Happy Hour was a wonderful, wild event. Thanks very much to all who entered, voted and cheered.

Congrats to the top 3 finishers!

• The Official Snoman Kit™ by Bobby McKenna
• A Scientific Examination of Extraordinary Proportions by Tyler Galpin
• Snowflake Shrug by Matthew Braun

… and to the Coaches’ Pick!

• Snowflake Mess by Riley Cran

As usual, the creativity of the Dribbble community astounds. Should we do it again soon?

We are now booking ads for January, February and March of 2011. There is a 10% discount for booking all three months up front.

We’ve revisited our advertising offerings and created more, smaller traffic blocks to open up additional slots. We’ve also added a new type of ad that runs for one week at the top of our most popular pages, which is great for promotions and product releases.

Learn more about the new prices and types of ads: http://dribbble.com/site/advertise

Whether your ad appears on Dribbble on not, have a very happy 2011!

With the holidays fast approaching, we’d thought it’d be fun to run a special rebound playoff to celebrate the joyous season of egg nog and pixeltoe. Given a simple theme and a one hour time limit, how creative can you be?

On Thursday, December 16th, we’ll be hosting Holiday Happy Hour! At 2pm EST sharp, we’ll upload a shot containing a simple holiday theme (from the Dribbble player account—so follow us :). Dribbble players will have ONE HOUR to rebound the shot, with the buzzer sounding at 3pm. Use the Like button to vote for your favorite rebounds and we’ll tally likes for contest purposes through 2pm EST on Friday December 17th, with the winners announced shortly thereafter.

The 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners will each receive:

• Dribbble t-shirt
• Signed copies of CSS3 For Web Designers and Handcrafted CSS
• Issues No.1 & No.2 of the fabulous Ferocious Quarterly (a curated publication that collects illustrators, graphic artists, short fiction authors and written text)
• 1 Symbolicons Bundle License (349 royalty-free vector icons)
• The Fusion Ads Holiday Bundle (13 apps, icons & much more—a $626 value)

In addition, we’ll award those same prizes to the “Coaches Pick” that we select from the remaining entries. 

The 1st place winner will also receive a one-year Developer Club Membership to UpThemes (valued at $387).

Thanks very much to our wonderful sponsor, Iceland wants to be your friend for presenting this special, wintry contest.

Players! See you on the court next Thursday, and best of luck against the clock.

Coach Dan & Coach Rich

As the buzzer sounds and the popcorn is swept up from the aisles, we look back upon the amazing week-long Veer Rebound Playoff. Riffing on three b’s from Alejandro Paul’s Fan Script, Dribbble players rebounded with their own takes and a pool of 10 incredible finalists was chosen by the community.

Like other playoffs before it, this one showcased the tremendous creativity that fuels Dribbble on a daily basis. It’s fascinating to see how each player’s unique style played into an interpretation of Ale’s b’s.

Veer promised to choose one of the 10 finalists as the Veer MVP, winning one of everything in the Veer merch store. Their panel of judges selected Dave Mott’s “And the band played on…”.

From the Veer blog:

And the winner is, Dave Mott, whose entry hit all the right notes with the judges. We loved Dave’s ingenious use of the Fan Script bbb characters, and how the marching band trumpeter matches the sports theme that both Dribbble and Fan Script share.

Congratulations, Dave, on a brilliant playoff run!

A special shout-out goes to the most-liked shot of the playoff, Ryan Putnam’s incredibly-detailed “Ticket Stub”. Ryan’s shot now holds the honor of earning more likes than any other in Dribbble history.

Thank you to all who entered and voted, and special thanks to Veer for sponsoring!

Dribbble has always had a healthy balance of work and play, and the rebound feature has fueled some amazing creativity. Take a look at a few of the past rebound playoffs to get a sense of how amazing this community is.

In order to foster and give more visibility to rebound exchanges, iteration from multiple players and playoffs themselves, we’ve just added a brand new Playoffs tab that’ll collect recent playoffs and their associated rebounds.

In celebration of the unveiling of this new tab, we’re also announcing an incredible featured playoff in association with our friends at Veer. The Veer Rebound Playoff kicked off at 2pm today, and for the next week Dribbble players can rebound their way to fabulous prizes. The Veer MVP (chosen from the 10 finalists) will win one of everything from the Veer merch store. Yes, you read that right. This is the Big Game, folks.

Voting ends on Wednesday, October 13th, at 2pm EST and the winners will be announced later that afternoon. Time to lace up those high-tops and show the world what you got.

The beauty of a vibrant social network, even one like Dribbble that is built on a few simple concepts, is relationships. Quickly, a rich body of information emerges about objects we value and company we keep. Here at Dribbble HQ, we’ve brainstormed about numerous initiatives for exploration of our social graph. We suspect that much of our long-run future lies here. But in the present, our to-do list overwhelms.

Instead of delaying adventures into the social strata indefinitely, we’re opening up the players’ association data to the community. The following information about a player is now available:

• followers
• [those a player is] following
• draftees
• drafted_by_player_id (id of player who drafted) is now an attribute of player

Descriptions of these operations (and all other API information) can be found in the Dribbble API documentation.

Also, please note that you can follow updates to the Dribbble API on Twitter.

We hope you catch the bug to study the viral nature of player relations. We think they’re facet-nating. (Booooo.)

Posted by Rich

Just over a week ago, we published the first draft of the Dribbble API. But it seems like much longer, given the avalanche of API-related inquiries, shots, apps, sites and other creations in this short period.

Players and other interested parties have been requesting an API from Dribbble’s [yes, I’m going there] Inception. (They asked during the beta; the beta beta; the beta beta beta; ok, the top has long stopped spinning on this joke.) We’ve always been excited about the prospect of having an API, but dragged our feet on it for a while, as it comes with risks.

Releasing an API marks the progression of an application from web site to PLATFORM. Even without the caps, it’s a scary transition. Ease of access to your data is accompanied by potential for abuse, new and more difficult-to-predict scaling issues, loss of control over the presentation of your content, the need to define guidelines for usage, etc. It’s a big leap.

It also presents business challenges: If folks start viewing Dribbble through other lenses (iPhone, iPad, etc), are we cannibalizing our own advertising revenue? How do our nascent efforts toward a sustainable Dribbble (revenue) fit in this new paradigm?

We thought long and hard about all these issues, read all the research and came up with a comprehensive 5-year plan for our business. Wait, that was in the dream. What we actually did was add another server, set some rate limits and take the red pill. (Whoops, wrong movie.)

We’re not sure how many levels deep the API is going to take us. And we don’t know what it means for our current reality. Nonetheless, the seed has been planted. APInception. We can’t wait to see what you dream up.

Posted by Rich

We recently changed our ad pricing and are now booking ads for July. Details can be found here:

http://dribbble.com/site/advertise

We tinkered with prices and traffic blocks in hopes of increasing appeal to smaller businesses, particularly those that want to experiment at a lower price point to see if their ads on Dribbble are effective. In addition to the new prices, here are some known knowns:

• Dribbble has high volume traffic and is growing; we’ve already served more ad impressions in June (2,791,170 through the 23rd) than May (2,567,313) with still 7 days remaining in the month.
• Dribbble has high quality traffic; a ridiculously talented, savvy audience of designers and other web professionals frequent the site.

With our growth, audience and new prices, we think advertising on Dribbble is a slam dunk. At $250, it’s now easy to find out for yourself.

- Posted by Rich

It’s been too long since we’ve posted what *we* are working on. Here are some highlights from the last 3 weeks:

• Improvements in our deployment infrastructure. Only time will tell how @gruber-proof we are, but we’ve added capacity and our servers are running cool despite increased traffic. To inifinity and beyond?! Still working on it, but we’re in a much better place than we were a month ago.
• Comments are commendable. You can like comments to show appreciation for feedback, humor, etc. We have further plans to draw attention to good comments and the players who make them, but merely adding likes for comments gives us a corpus of data from which to begin the work of highlighting those worthy of, um, comment.
• Follow up comments now appear in the incoming activity stream. Many people asked us for the ability to be alerted to comments following their own so they’d be able to keep track of discussions. Our first step to address this was to add follow up comments to the incoming activity stream. (In case you didn’t know, there is an RSS feed for this stream; it is arguably the best way to keep abreast of everything happening in your Dribbblesphere.) This has been well received by some, less so by others. We realize that the volume and utility of this feature varies by user. We wanted to push it in its simplest form and get a sense of usage; we’ll be refining it so you can customize to taste going forward.
• Notifications (tab under the Account page). You can now sign up to receive email notifications for certain events at Dribbble. The first set of events are 1) a comment on one of your shots and 2) being followed. We’ll be adding more going forward. Notification of likes and follow up comments are likely candidates to go next.
• Simpler login. We used to get a surprising (at least to me) number of requests for help logging in. Usually the issue was that someone created a login containing capital letters (damn you, iPhone) and tried to login using all lowercase. A postgres function and index later, login is now case-insensitive. Additionally, you can login using your email address (also case-insensitive). Hopefully this marks the end of login difficulties. So say we all.

Upcoming? This week we’re working on refactorings and performance improvements. We have a mountainous backlog of annoyances and enhancements to plow through. We know that folks are salivating - dare I say dribbbling - for an API. We have the unsavory business of making money so I don’t have to get a real job. And we have BIG NEW SECRET STUFF in the early stages of development. We’ll post a few shots along the way … if we can find a good site for that sort of thing.

- Posted by Rich

Dribbble began way back in 2008 as a little side project between two Salem, MA neighbors whose kids played together. As luck would have it, Dan and I happened to be web enthusiasts with complementary skills. We both had jobs and kids, and then we had two kids, so time to work on our idea was scarce. Progress was slow. But always enjoyable.

In 2009, we decided we had built enough to invite some folks to try it out and see if the idea of sharing small screenshots of design work resonated. People came, and though the number of users was small, the content was dazzling. (For proof, check out the inimitable Shaun Inman and the progression of his game, Mimeo, that has captivated Dribbblers for the past 6 months.) It wasn’t long before we realized that the designers who had assembled in Dribbble were producing something special: A sparkling, real-time window of the web as it was being rendered.

We grew our membership slowly to preserve the quality of our content and community. But also, frankly, to keep the site manageable given constraints on our time. As Dribbble drew more users, shots and attention, we were thrilled. The list of features and possibilities for the community began to seem endless; simultaneously, our flaws became more noticeable and irritating. Though a labor of love, there just wasn’t much spare time in our lives to work on Dribbble.

Recently, circumstances changed - my son was in school longer, my baby daughter was now a toddler and my wife was offered a full-time, work-at-home writing job (after years of staying home with the kids). We saw opportunities on many fronts - career, lifestyle, independence. And Dribbble. We decided to take a risk. I left my job and, on Monday, became the first full-time employee at Dribbble.

It wasn’t an easy decision. I had been working for the last 3 years at PatientsLikeMe where they are - for real, not in press releases - changing the future of health care. I am forever indebted to them for giving me an opportunity to work on something truly meaningful and great. If you’re a software developer in the Boston area and want to use Ruby on Rails to build software that has significant impact on people’s lives, I hope you’ll consider working at PatientsLikeMe which is looking for Experienced Ruby on Rails Developers.

As for Dribbble, what does the change mean? Engineering resources have been our primary bottleneck, so we’ll be able to ramp up the time we spend improving Dribbble by a factor of ~10. We have hundreds of ideas to improve the site and suddenly more time to advance them. Here are some highlights of what we’ll be doing in the near future:

• Publishing the first portion of the Dribbble API.
• Growing the community. We’ll be issuing another round of invitations soon. We’re still obsessed with the quality of our content and community, but we have more time to invest in monitoring growth and releasing features to help the community manage itself. We’re long overdue for an expansion and now in a better position to manage it.
• Fixing bugs. (We need to get those comment hyperlinks hyperlinking! And many others.)
• Building new features. The community has given us incredible feedback and we have many ideas of our own. Plus you need to be able to see follow-up comments after you comment. (That makes me weep, too. Sorry.)
• Writing. We not only have more time to work on Dribbble, but also to write about it. It’s fun, we love this community and want to be more transparent about what *we* are working on. We now have time to be more active in doing so.

One final, but important, note: We owe a HUGE debt of gratitude to our advertisers who took a chance on a new platform. Without ad revenue, I could not have taken the risk to do this full-time. If you haven’t already, please check out the advertising page where our current advertisers are displayed on the right. Simply click through and buy all their products :)

http://dribbble.com/site/advertise

Now back to practice so we have more to show on the court. 1 … 2 … 3 … DEE-FENSE!

Fist bumps,

Rich
Employee #1

Have a product or service you’d like our vibrant, focused community of designers, developers and creatives to check out? We’ve published new rates and traffic data from our first two weeks of being publicly viewable, and we’re lining up advertising slots for May. Book a spot today.

Also, a big thank you to all of our current advertisers, who’ve taken a leap of faith with us during our inaugural month. You’re helping us continue to make Dribbble awesome.

One criticism Dribbble has received is that it’s a star system; well-known players get far more views and dominate the popular lists, making it difficult for talented but lesser-known players to draw fans. It’s a valid concern.

While stars will always shine in reputation theater, we very much want Dribbble to be a stage for discovering new talent. On that front, there’s a lot we can do. To start, we’ve added a ”Debuts” tab to the front page which displays the opening (first) shot from each new player.

http://dribbble.com/shots/debuts

Rookies, your first shot just got a lot more visibility, so make it a swish. Players, we encourage you to keep tabs on this tab to scout the influx of new talent. (There’s an RSS feed as well, which makes doing so a layup.) When you see a rookie do something special, lavish Like and affection. Because once upon a time, someone gave you your first shot.

Looking to reach a vibrant, focused community of designers and other web creatives?

Dribbble is offering a rotating sidebar advertising module that houses a standard, 120×90 image plus a short line of text. We’re gearing up for our upcoming public launch by lining up advertising slots this week.

WHY BUY A SPOT NOW?

We’ll be putting all the marketing wheels in motion to promote the launch on the following channels:

• simplebits.com ~100,000 unique visitors per month
• twitter.com/simplebits 19,100+ followers 
• twitter.com/dribbble 3,162+ followers 
• twitter.com/wrycoder 400+ followers (Yeah, baby! :) 
• Right here at blog.dribbble.com

Interested? Email contact [at] dribbble dot com for more info.

Soon, we’ll be pulling back the curtain on Dribbble, a new community we’ve been crafting for quite some time. Dribbble has enjoyed a long and active private beta, and we’re excited to finally share it with the world.

But first, what is it? Dribbble is show and tell for designers, developers and other creatives. Members share sneak peeks of their work as “shots” — small screenshots of the designs and applications they are working on. It’s also a place to talk design, give and receive feedback and iterate toward better work.

Whether Dribbble should be public (for some value of public :) has been a source of much debate on the interwebs. Please know that we care deeply about this community and the amazing work that’s being shared. We’re also well aware that Dribbble is all about quality over quantity. With that in mind, here is what we are going to do in the very near future:

• Make all member content publicly viewable. This means users, shots, rebounds, comments, etc.
• Continue to allow ONLY members to contribute content, i.e. upload shots, rebound, make comments, etc.
• Continue to draft new members ONLY by invitation from other members.

In a nutshell: Dribbble will be READ-ONLY for non-members, and READ-WRITE for members.

REGARDING PRIVACY

We originally envisioned all shots being viewable by anyone, but user feedback has us strongly considering optional controls over who sees a given shot (for shots that are sensitive or warrant limited review). We want these controls to be lightweight but powerful enough to facilitate sharing. If members have feedback - particularly how they’d use private shots and who they’d want to see them - please let us know here:

http://getsatisfaction.com/dribbble/topics/feedback_on_privacy

Regarding membership: Dribbble is only as good as its players. That’s why we’re continuing to use the draft to recruit new talent.

FINDING A PICKUP GAME

We get a lot of requests from folks who aren’t on Dribbble and don’t know anyone on Dribbble, but would like to present their work for consideration by a member with invitations. Ultimately, we want to get that process into Dribbble itself, but for now, we’d like to point these requests here:

http://getsatisfaction.com/dribbble/topics/how_do_we_submit_ourselves_to_get_a_dribbble_invite

Folks looking for an invite can post a URL to their work and email address in this thread. Any existing member scouting new talent to draft can look here to find it.

That’s it for now. Exciting times ahead!

Fist bumps,

Assistant General Manager Dan Cederholm
Assistant to the General Manager Rich Thornett

Welcome to the official Dribbble blog, where we will be documenting all things dribbbly. News, new features, feedback, announcements, etc. will go here through the magic of electricity and magnetism. Stay tuned.