We’ve just added @ mention support in comments! This is a little screencast showing how it all works. Mentions will also show up in your Activity, making it easier to keep track of what other players are saying about you.
Big thank you to Dribbble consultant-at-large @monkeyatlarge for his 800lb gorilla-sized contributions to the new mentions feature.
In our continued efforts to help members discover and follow great new work, we’ve launched a new Shots tab today called Suggestions. Our first release simply shows a stream of shots from people you don’t follow that have been liked by those you do. Hovering over the thumbnail will show you which member did the liking.
It’s quickly become one of our favorite views over here at Dribbble HQ, exposing a seemingly endless stream of new talent. We hope you like seeing what other folks like as much as we like.
:D
Today we’re fired up to announce a new feature for Pro members. Find Designers is a powerful tool to search for Dribbble members by location, skills, work availability, and more. Location search has been one of the most requested features since we started the site, so we’re thrilled to finally make it available. Being able to wade through the community’s ever-growing talent pool makes discovering and connecting with designers that interest you even easier.
Pro members can start using Find Designers today (just click the new ‘Designers’ tab on the main menu). If you’re a drafted player who hasn’t gone Pro, you can see example results in “Practice Mode” to get a feel for how it works.
We realize that non-players, particularly those looking to hire designers, will also be interested in finding users. We’ll be turning our attention to this crowd in the very near future, so stay tuned.
In addition to search, we’ve added lists of the cities, countries, and skills on Dribbble (accessible from the Find Designers page). This gives, quite literally, the lay of the land of our global community.
We’ve made skills, previously a Pro-only feature, available to all players and prospects. Any player or prospect can now add skills to their profile from the Account page (Pros: this has moved from your Account/Pro page). We hope this will help with finding more members and drafting prospects.
We’ve discovered many new local designers and globetrotting Dribbblers during development. We hope you Find Designers as much fun as we have.
Two weeks ago, we gave Pro members the ability to display their work availability via the Hire Me button. Today, Pros can now add skills to their profile.
If you’re a Pro, head over to the Pro tab in your Account settings and add up to 10 keywords that describe the work you do (e.g. ui, illustration, icon design, lettering, css, etc.). Your skills list will display under your bio on your main profile, giving the community a better sense of what you specialize in.
These skill links don’t go anywhere just yet—but eventually we’ll tie these into searchable, filterable player card lists, adding yet another lens to discover and connect with creatives around the globe.
Dribbble has become a fantastic place to discover creative talent, and we’ve long been hearing success stories from Dribbble players who receive a steady stream of work requests via the site. We want to make connections between free agents and talent scouts even easier.
Today we’ve launched a new feature for Pro members, allowing them to indicate if they’re available for hire (this can be set on the Account/Pro page). When available, Dribbble pros have a “Hire Me” button on their profiles, allowing potential clients to contact them via email. Additionally, their player cards display an icon in the top right corner, showing that they’re available for work.
To see it all in action, check out this short screencast about the new feature:
To contact pros available for hire, you must be signed in at Dribbble. This helps employers have an identity in the community and provides members for hire with a measure of protection against spam. That said, starting today, we’ve made it even easier to join Dribbble as a spectator. A Twitter account is no longer required to create an account. Sign up is quick and easy.
On the heels of Player Cards, this is the second release in a progression to make it easier for Dribbble members get discovered and hired. Stay tuned for more.
We’ve introduced a small but fun new feature today: Player Cards. Dribbble is a site about showing your work, so we’ve updated member lists across the site to do the same—they now display a shot (if applicable) for each member in the list, as well as member location and a few stats.
In addition to looking much better than our old lists, we hope this view of users makes it easier to find people of interest by allowing you to see their location and a sample of their work up front. Lists of fans, following/followers, user search results and Player tab pages now feature the new player cards.
If you’re a player on Dribbble, we’ve pre-selected a shot for your player card (which is always visible in your Account settings), but you can update the card at any time by following the “Use for player card” link on any of your shots.
This release is also the first in a larger effort to help creatives on Dribbble get found more easily—and hired. Much more on that in the future. We’re excited to get the ball rolling in this direction, so head over and update your card. If only we could include a stick of bubblegum with each one.
There’s an amazing variety of shots uploaded on Dribbble every day, and it’s our continual challenge to make it easier to discover new and interesting content. Today we’ve launched Buckets to help the community participate in curating Dribbble.
Buckets are simply collections of shots that any Dribbble member can create. We think they will be a handy way to organize the great work you’re finding into helpful sets that you can return to later. We also hope that browsing each other’s buckets (whoops, that sounds naughty) will be a valuable lens through which to discover work on Dribbble that’s of interest to you.
So go forth and bucket! This feature is available to all members and you can create as many as you’d like. We’re excited to see what you find.
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:
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.
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!
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:
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 …
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.
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.
Dribbble is show and tell for designers. Share sneak peeks of your work as “shots” — small screenshots of the designs and applications you’re working on. This is our official blog.
Threads and goods for designers like you. Official Dribbble shirts in our equipment shop.
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