Do You Judge A Designer’s Skills From His Dribbble Design Portfolio?

Dribbble is a vast social media platform used by all designers to share their work, get inspiration from and build their design portfolio. The moment you land on the home page, you start seeing all types of digital work from creative people all over the world.

May it be graphics, mobile apps, websites, interaction designs, illustrations, everything is under one roof, right in front of you to feast your eyes.But when you look underneath these glamorous shots & rebounds, animations & illustrations, there lies an inherent problem.

And it can be seen in its most amplified manner when we look for people on Dribbble to primarily showcase their UI/UX skills. So, what’s this problem?

When you try to look for designers showcasing mobile apps, websites, and their UI/UX skills on Dribbble, this is what you see.

Most designers showcase only 2–3 final screens of their product as part of their design portfolio. The big problem in such a case is that we have no context & background of the design, & we’re only seeing the result, which had a very long process behind it to reach where it is.

A design process for includes ideation, information architecture, wireframing, design exploration, & then the final design. Understanding this design process of a designer is very important for a prospective client to understand the designer’s abilities to solve a problem,

This thought process behind the choices that he made, and the approach that he took that led to the final design. Dribbble is structured as a social media platform. It is very difficult or almost impossible for a designer to showcase his entire process in detail or step by step.

 So what ends up happening is that a lot of designers straight up skimp the thorough design process for a product and just put up 2–3 screens without thinking from a macro perspective of how these screens will fit in on an actual 200 screen project.

And this, in turn, allows them to churn out multiple designs per week to upload on the platform, and they get rewarded with followers for their regular day-to-day uploads. People who don’t have significant design insights would think that this a designer is good.

Being perceived as a sound designer shouldn’t be a popularity contest!Also, now Dribbble is mainly filled up with such UI/UX designs that are very artsy, beautiful, and pleasing to look at but lack the depth that it needs to have to do what it’s supposed to do — solve a problem.

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Originally Published at ProCreator Blog, Written by — Varad Parulekar.