I recently added “Meetups Coordinator” to my list of job titles here at Dribbble. As a team, we’ve spent the last few weeks brainstorming ways to help support and grow our Meetups scene. We’re thrilled to have Shopify on board as our partner and global sponsor in these efforts.
Meetups come in all flavors, with one of the most popular involving three basic ingredients: Tasty Beverages + Dribbblers + Good Conversation. While we don’t want to mess with perfection, I’ll be touching base with Meetup organizers to see if they’d like a little more: Meetup Kits (AKA swag), publicity ideas, activities suggestions. We’d love to attend every Meetup everywhere but can’t. What we can do is offer a little more help from here.
Designer/developer/course producer Daniel Archer organized a great Meetup in Santa Monica at General Assembly LA this week. Daniel did a lot of advance work, which I’ve outlined below. He also took the time to provide us an extensive event write-up, which we’re sharing as well. We hope it serves to inspire. Thank you, Daniel!
Advance Work
- General Assembly created an event page.
- Daniel created a Meetup Shot (above) and invited Rebounds. The designers behind the top three shots, pictured below, received Gameplan Notebooks. Congratulations to (L-R) Joshua Benedikt, Ray Martin and Tsam.
- At Meetup.com, Daniel posted not only with the Dribbble Santa Monica group, but also with the LA group and the (non-Dribbble) LA Startup Community group.
- Daniel reached out to The Noun Project and Otis College of Art and Design, who joined the event as sponsors, speakers, promoters, and participants. (See write-up below).
- Daniel reached out to area Dribbblers Nathan Yoder (Sevenly) and Dan Kuhlken (DKNG), who did a little show-and-tell of their design processes.
- Dribbble and Shopify served as official event sponsors. We also sent swag and the Gameplan Notebooks, plus promoted via our Weekly Replay and Twitter feed.
Event Wrap-up from Daniel
At the event, we had check-in setup and handed out nametags and handed them the small bag of stickers (included General Assembly stickers as well). The Noun Project and The OTIS College of Art and Design set up booths at the back of the lounge.
The Noun Project had Moo postcards with icons on them, and they placed them throughout the lounge for attendees to find cool ones and take them home. They also invited guests to draw their own icons at their booth (inspired by LA), and they will vector-ize them and throw them up on Instagram, Twitter, and on their own site. Edward Boatman from The Noun Project spoke last in the night, and showed off a few popular icons and described their importance.
OTIS brought a button-maker, and guests had a lot of fun making buttons out of The Noun Project’s icons. Dennis Delgado, their social media person and alum, spoke on how he redesigned classroom spaces to make them more collaborative and interactive.
We also had a photo booth from The Bosco that turned photos into animated gifs, and invited users to share online.
WeAreLATech was also there taking photos and tweeting.
The schedule ended up being like this:
- 6:00pm: Sign-In
- 7:00pm: Intro to GA, welcome to the design community, quick talk by Jill DaSilva and Ashley Karr, General Assembly UX Immersive Instructors
- 7:20-7:45p: Makers Moment with Nathan Yoder of Sevenly
- 7:45-8:00p: Makers Moment with Dennis Delgado of Otis College of Art and Design
- 8:40-8:45p: Dribbble Rebound Challenge Winners
- 8:45-9:00p: Makers Moment with Dan Kuhlken of DKNG Studios
- 9:00-9:15p - Makers Moment with Edward Boatman of The Noun Project
Nathan spoke on his lettering process and showed off some really cool early sketches turned into final versions, and Dan showed a timelapse of his process in making an illustrated poster for the band Primus. [Ed. Note: They both participated in the Rebound too - see below with Dan left, Nathan right.] All the speakers were really, really awesome. They all took questions for 3-5 minutes, and the guests had a lot of good questions for them. As a thank you to the speakers, we gave them each General Assembly backpacks (leather and grey cloth), with T-shirts donated from The Noun Project and OTIS.
We had food (perfect amount for the attendees) and a lot of beer and wine, which everyone enjoyed. We also had awesome music playing, when there were no speakers. At the beginning of the second set of talks, I showed off the Rebounds from the challenge and then gave away the Gameplan Notebooks. They loved them. It’s really impressive how we had 12 rebounds, and many of them only came at the last minute. One of the rebounds we asked the designer (who’s also a student of ours) to design a similar one for use on the printouts from the photo booth.
In all, we had 63 guests. They were a great group of the right designers in LA. Many even stayed until 10-ish still chatting and meeting.
Meetup chatter have you itching to socialize? Check out our latest Weekly Replay for upcoming Meetups or visit Host a Meetup and get started on one in your area.
Find more Meetups stories on our blog Courtside. Have a suggestion? Contact stories@dribbble.com.
