PSD Template Story

Hello Dribbblers,

I would like to tell a short story about this shot and what I have learned from it. I have never thought that such a simple step like publishing a tiny picture could be quite a big adventure.

Like many good, bad, great, silly, useful, helpful or innovative things (maybe not, we have still a question here), this one has been started from an ordinary idea, that seemed as a one-hour task to accomplish.

At some moment I felt like I need (very badly) to make a clean b&w design layout just for switching from everyday routine. Sounds pretty simple and easy for starting. When the first version was done I felt like something is missing and that was annoying. I didn't feel any satisfaction and postponed with publishing. After the first attempt, I switched back to my work.

The second try I made in a while with a strong feeling that adding photos would help me to finish the task and maybe expand it to some series of pictures with different modular grids or so. However, I was again unhappy about the result.

I started looking for anything that might be useful afterward and came up with an idea very quickly. That was about making a PSD template. In this case, I don't need to worry about efforts and time I spent already because it would be a project for a bigger audience.

The new task looked clear and work begun on a simple version with a layout I liked. Lots of inspiration came through understanding that due to one shot for Dribbble I added a new sense and it became a real side project.

Being motivated I published my first shot (https://dribbble.com/shots/3340886-Front-Page) even before uploading the template to ThemeForest. Look at the date 😱. As it was expected I got my first hard reject. Then I published next shots (https://dribbble.com/shots/3547112-Two-Variants-of-Blog-Page and https://dribbble.com/shots/3627510-Product-Page-and-Shop-Page) and got next hard reject in a couple days. Then I decided to pause the work on the project for some time.

I can continue with rejects, but honestly speaking there were only two and those two were soft rejects. Less than a week ago the PSD template was approved and I have got a good reason for writing this post.

In conclusion, I could say that even small projects might be very challenging if you don't have feedback with information to analyze. Secondly, making a template differs from any other commercial project, even if it seems similar.

Also, I suspect that the current project hasn't finished yet 😇💛