Time flies when you’re having fun exploring endless design inspiration. Today is extra special because it marks Dribbble’s 10th anniversary.
Row 1: Sören Selleslagh, Dan Matutina, Rachel Avallone for Owen Jones. Row 2: Patswerk, Michael DiCristina, Laura Moyer. Row 3: Aleg, Michael DiCristina.
What are you working on?
This seemingly innocuous question is what kickstarted Dribbble a decade ago and helped morph it into the thriving design community that it is today.
Back in 2008, Dan Cederholm and Rich Thornett matched their design and developer expertise and together created Dribbble, a show-and-tell site where designers share what they’re working on. A year later the first version of Dribbble launched.
The first shot
10 years ago years today, the first Shot was uploaded to Dribbble by our co-founder, Dan Cederholm:
The first designers
A few months later, the first 50 designers were invited to Dribbble. Dan personally mailed t-shirts and handwritten notes inviting some of his friends from the design community to Dribbble. Dan and Rich were still working full-time jobs, and Dribbble was still a passion side-project.
Fast forward to today, the community has grown from a few thousand passionate designers to a global community of millions of designers and design enthusiasts. In that time, Dribbble has had a profound impact on people’s lives — helping designers find work they love and advancing their craft in ways they never thought possible. Community is the heart of Dribbble, then and now.
More designers are on Dribbble than ever before
It’s an exciting time for Dribbble. We’re releasing new features at a record pace. From new hi-res Shots to video support, a really cool 404 page to launching iOS, Android apps, and integrations with Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD and others. Tens of thousands of designers now get together in real-life at Dribbble Meetups all over the world. We even launched our own design conference, Hang Time. We’ve hit an inflection point. In recent years we’ve seen our traffic double, our community triple in size, and our revenue quadruple —which we’ve reinvested in growing our internal team.
Investing in our team
For the first four years, Dribbble was a team-of-two working out of a co-working space in Salem, Massachusetts. Six years ago, Patrick joined the team. Five years ago, Ian joined. Four years ago Jeffrey and Adam joined. Two and a half years ago I joined as CEO, and over the years to follow, we’ve grown the team to just under 50 employees and contractors —all working fully remote from all over North America (and Dave in the UK), allowing us to build features for the community at a much higher velocity. Today we have the team in place to help us build the next ten years of Dribbble.
We’re just getting started
Our mission remains to make designers successful. That means ensuring that Dribbble is your go-to destination to share, grow, and get hired. Here are a few things we’ll be focusing on to help you take your craft and career to new heights:
A better portfolio to tell your work’s story
You want a rich portfolio that’s not only easy to create and customize, but also one that flexes with your creative work. Our portfolio tools will provide designers the canvas and functionality to outline solutions, design thinking, case studies all in one place. While the Shot will always be the feature that started Dribbble, these portfolio enhancements will give you the tools you need to tell your work’s full story and share it with the world.
Feedback & Collaboration
Giving and receiving thoughtful feedback within a global community of millions of designers is a complex challenge. Meaningful feedback loops are incredibly important to our community and we want to make certain feedback is still at the helm of Dribbble’s design community. You’ll soon be able to share work privately with trusted circles of peers or with your clients for feedback and critique.
Your next career adventure awaits
Dribbble Talent was created to offer a better hiring experience for designers, one that takes the luck or laborious work out of the equation and drops you straight into an interview process with multiple companies. We want to simplify and elevate the designer hiring process so that we match you with the work and the role that you love. Our aim is to make finding your next project or in-house gig as easy as a few clicks.
Helping great work breakthrough
As part of our mission, we want to ensure that the amazing work created every day is seen by as many people as possible. We’re working on better ways to promote and support up-and-coming artists and established designers alike. Keep an eye out for new discovery and promotion channels coming to your favorite inspiration destination.
10 years down; decades to go.
The Dribbble community is more engaged than ever as we move closer towards our mission to make designers successful. Our ambition is to help every designer in the world share their work to an audience of millions, find inspiration, refine their craft, and advance their career on Dribbble.
We’re so thankful for this exceptionally talented, dedicated, and engaged community of designers. Through the Dribbble community, the best and brightest design work will be created - and we can’t wait to see it and share it.
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