Dribbble (for those unfamiliar) is a show and tell website for creatives. designers, developers and other creatives who share shots — small screenshots of the designs and applications they are working on

There has been quite a recent debate on the approach Dribbble takes in recruiting new members – and this has in part led to my curiosity and attempt to get dribbling myself.

My personal experience has been – non-starting. Without a network of peers already on Dribbble I have not been able to found a way into this club of exclusivity. Exclusivity is not a bad thing, and I can understand the approach, as the owners say – to avoid inviting people who will upload a pictures of their cat.

Much of the work on Dribble (IMHO) is nothing short of amazing, and maintaining a high standard of quality is commendable and no doubt a tricky task as the site has grown, but it sure is frustrating to be left on the sideline!

The Dribble suggested approach is to sign up as a ‘Prospect’. But hang on, as I can’t post any shots – how will I be picked up as a prospect – who on earth will want to follow someone who cannot post shots… well to my great surprise looking at the leaderboard of prospects (at the time of writing) the leader Alison Gardiner has 549 followers but is yet to be invited and as such has no work on the site! (Alison, if you read this – I would love to know your thoughts).

Looking at the approach others are taking ranges from commendable, to discouraging and just straight wrong. For me, the commendable is asking those across the internet who may have been in a similar predicament and undertake a similar line of design to yourself – and as such can appreciate your work – and therefore recommend you by way of a golden invitation.

The discouraging (and it seems a common) approach is for those with invites to court invitees by way of coaxing them into following the provider on twitter, asking for re-tweets to aid self-promotion, entering their competitions and generally requesting a bit of grovelling – none of which really has any implication on quality of work.

The straight wrong approach… well as the saying goes “money talks”.

Even the commendable approach is not without fraught. After setting up a twitter search for ‘dribbble invite’ amongst all those requesting an invite was an offer open to all – or so I thought. I saw someone had tweeted “Looks like I have another @Dribbble invite… Who is looking for one?”.

Never met the guy before, but had seen (and admired his work) so I responded and got a flat rejection on the basis that I didn’t follow him Twitter, had never clicked “like” any of his stuff as a spectator, or had never never spoken with him before. Oh well.

I think thats enough for now – I must have already hampered my chances of being invited sufficiently :)

Perhaps some of you couldn’t give a stuff about my thoughts and just hoped reading this will help you get an invite. I doubt it will, but perhaps reading finddribbbleinvites.com might be of more help, and point 3 made on canigetadribbbleinvite.com is direct but perhaps true – either way, best of luck.

Life does go on – dribbbleless for now.

Dagenham swimming pool, East London was transformed into a BMX park by Nike.

Worth watching the video to the end… that last trick defied the laws of physics!

A welcome break in Spain with all of the family involving an excursion to North Africa. Hopefully some of this will be helpful to another Brit planning a trip to Southern Spain with a young family in tow. If nothing more, it should serve as a reminder to look back on someday.

The hols started off with a great flight on Easyjet. Based on last years experience, my advice if you have a young family under your wing is… avoid Ryanair at all costs. Easyjet allowed us to board immediately after those that had purchased ‘Speedy Boarding’ (being that we had a child under 5 with us). In stark contrast, on our last holiday, Ryanair canceled our return flight without any notice while in the queue at the airport (as a result of the ashcloud fiasco – even though every other airline continued flights on the same route) and to make matters worse on the replacement flight we had to book for a few days later with Ryanair – they over booked the flight and even though we had children, made us wait till absolutely everyone else boarded and luckily we able to board us in place of people who failed to turn up. Absolutely appalling.

Rant end, back to this year.

I had pre-booked a rental car to collect at Málaga airport so travel with the kids back to our place was all arranged, and for travelling around southern Spain I throughly recommend booking a rental car. On advice I read, I booked the car via Easyjet (with Eurocar) and received a notable discount. It is worth mentioning – driving on the right with a left hand drive car in a location with several roundabouts is tricky to say the least, especially at first. But, take the time to have a little local practice after collecting the car and if you are a competent driver, you should be fine – especially if you are a London driver! Spanish drivers tend to make the rules as they go along – but with big new roads and Motorways the driving conditions are great and on a sunny day (most) the scenery is simply breathtaking with mountains and greenery as far as the eye can see.

In the next post, i’ll cover local entertainment and the excursion to Africa!

Somewhere in the world there has been an early screening of the film and Daft Punk are apparently themselves in the film too… as if it couldn’t get any better.

Very much looking forward to watching this in IMAX 3D… and these ADIDAS trainers that will be released in Dec 2010 which incorporate three dimensional, elastomeric, membranous, flexible electroluminescent lamps! In other words, these are lamps built into the shoes!

These are my thoughts after attending the Breakfast talk with Neville Brody at the V&A as part of the London Design Festival.

Given his status as a Graphic Designer, Typographer, Art Director and Brand Strategist this was an event that I was very much looking forward to since booking the tickets – and it did not disappoint. While I had earlier learnt of the Anti Design Festival being planned (the primary subject if the talk which has subsequently launched), I admit to being just as intrigued with the man himself and his thoughts on design as a whole and where the future of where visual communication was heading.

The talk being hosted by a Times journalist who was perhaps a little too keen on talking about himself and his own opinion (even with the excuse of prompting from Brody). However, a reasonable range of subject matter was covered within the hour, while allowing sufficient time for audience questions.

“Design has become more obsessed with style than content.” This was essential the theme of Brody’s opinion throughout the talk and the reasoning behind why the Anti Design Festival was created – an antidote to the over polished London Design Festival as a whole (with tongue firmly in cheek as the talk itself was introduced by Ben Evans, LDF Director).

Brody also talked of “Heading for a knowledge revolution” which with the integration of the Internet into daily life through so many devices – this is hardly surprisingly. More suprising was his opinion that  ”No such thing as a graphic designer existing anymore, more visual communicator”.

In my opinion is that there has long been a requirement to wear many hats to be successful in a commercial environment. This has been the case for many years now, and having studied Science, Computer Science and Design for Visual Communication, I still (and always will) maintain that at my core – I will always be a Graphic Designer, so to have Brody effectively dismiss that future students will not be able to hold on to such an idenity (especially given his new role as Head of the Department of Communication Art & Design within the Royal College of Art) is somewhat concerning.

On a more positive note, hearing Brody talk of how LCP taught design as a craft was something I can very agree with from my time there and my hope is that he takes this approach from the other side of the desk continuing through to the future.

After the talk I did have a chance to have a short offline talk with Brody from my persepctive as an Interactive Designer and ask about his work on the global visual language for the BBC’s digital services, but given these thoughts were offline, I think it would be respectful to keep them that way… but I was appreciative for his stark honesty.

Anti Design Festival

Cute animation by Google for the Japanese audience demonstrating how ‘harmless’ StreetView is.

Very cute – Would this have softened public reception internationally?

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