Sharing and Learning in Design Networks

“What are you doing next year?” As the end of the academic year approaches, the number of times that question is put forth to me seems to rise week on week. More often than not I promptly (and truthfully) reply, “I’m not quite sure” and hastily move on to a different, less uncertain conversation topic. Despite trying to avoid the question, the more I’m asked about it the more I consider life beyond University and what I need to prepare for it. A portfolio is an obvious step towards applying for jobs and online platforms like Behance or Dribbble are networks which allow you to present and share the work you have either completed, or are working on. Not only can you share your work on these online communities but they are also beneficial because they offer a means for feedback, an invaluable way to strengthen your current and future work. This process could be perceived as an informal method of learning. Sites like the ones mentioned above can be considered learning networks for the way in which you can exchange knowledge with others. I have found them to be a great starting point for inspiration as well.

Learning Networks

In an article about Learning Networks and Networked Learning, Peter Sloep and Adriana Berlanga discuss how learning networks are online social networks where participants share knowledge with each other (2010). The conversations held within these environments allow users to jointly develop new knowledge, it is a process of sharing information and collaborating. Sloep and Berlanga refer to a learning network as a social network where participants often share similar interests. These participants are generally the main actors of the network and can take on many roles from learner to teacher to interested bystander. Sloep and Berlanga provide a list of activities that users may carry out within such networks to increase their knowledge and skill;

• Exchange experiences and knowledge with others.
• Work collaboratively on projects (e.g. innovation, research, assignments).
• Set up working groups, communities, discussions, conferences.
• Offer and receive support to/from others in the Learning Network (e.g., questions, remarks, etc.).
• Assess themselves and others, find learning resources, create and elaborate their competence profiles.

In the rest of the post I will be giving an overview of four online communities that offer designers a platform to share their work, connect with other designers, and gain feedback for their work. These sites are; Behance, Dribbble, Forrst and Hunie. While not specifically advertised as learning networks, these websites have attributes that allow for some of these activities to occur. All facilitate the sharing of work and allow designers to generate feedback for their work. But they do have a varying degree of accessibility and their level of constructive and credible feedback is variable.

Behance

Behance, recently acquired by Adobe, is largely a portfolio based network that allows designers to organize their work.

The leading online platform to showcase & discover creative work. The creative world updates their work in one place to broadcast it widely and efficiently. Companies explore the work and access talent on a global scale.

With over 50,000,000 page views (and rapidly counting) Behance has quickly become the platform that attracts those who want to discover talent. It is a great place for designers and bystanders to get inspiration from as it presents a wide range of fields, such as graphic design, art direction, branding, photography, and architecture. Behance is largely concerned with allowing work to gain exposure so creatives can continue to spend more time on creating and provide opportunities for work or collaboration. Click on the picture below to see a sample post by Boat Studio.

The Temper Trap packaging and album art by Boat Studio

Accessibility to this site is easy, you just sign up to start creating your profile. With a profile, you can follow other designers and get emails when these designers have added to their profile. Your work can also be shared to external sites.

Behance isn’t terribly conducive to getting critiques with comments under posts like “OMG”, but it does use ‘appreciations’ as a measure of how other people value the work. Searches within this platform can be filtered geographically as well as by amount of “appreciations”.

Dribbble

Dribbble is a place to show and tell, promote, discover, and explore design.

Dribble is a community of designers ranging from web designers and graphic designers, illustrators, icon artists, typographers, logo designers, and other creative types. Where the main idea of Behance is a personal portfolio, the Dribbble platform is oriented to gather more feedback to work rather than just displaying it. It is not exactly a platform to host your portfolio, rather it is a network that allows users to “show and tell” their work, but you have to be ‘drafted’ as a ‘player’ to be able to post work or make comments (the founders use a lot of basketball references). This process means that members take on the responsibility of drafting prospects who have interesting work.

Prospects: If you are a designer who would like to be invited to share your work you would sign up as a prospect. Anyone can sign up as a prospect, and your name will be added to a prospects list. Prospects are still required to have a portfolio on an external website to show off their work to members.

Players: You become a player through invitation from a member. Invitations to draft prospects are periodically issued to players for them to be able to draft a prospect.

Scouts: Are those who are interested in finding and following designers.

The format of sharing is through small screenshots (400×300) that show work, process work and current projects. The relationship between the “shots” and Dribbble has been likened to the relationship between tweets and Twitter. These shots can be shared to social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest, and also show the colour palettes of the work which you can download. The comments section can be used to gain feedback but also allows the Player to respond and sometimes give insight into how they created an aspect of their design. For example on this shot, one player wrote, “I really like this style of the magnified part of the image, it keeps things simple but lends a unique look” to which the player responded “that’s what I was going for, thanks! It’s actually just flipped though, rather than magnified. Just cut a circle out and flipped it horizontally, then tinted it.” As evidenced, there are opportunities for players to respond to one another and create a dialogue surrounding their work.

A “rebound” is a shot in reply to another shot to allow for follow up and link shots together. This aspect is useful for showing your process, for example, a sketch may then rebound with a completed design. Similarly alternatives or variations for a design can be rebounded so there is a reference trail.

An example of a rebound can be seen below where Ryan Weaver presents a shot of the beginnings of an album cover design, then rebounds with the finished concept.

There are also rebounds that arise which don’t necessarily have to be work, they may just provide an opportunity for Dribbble players to participate. “Playoffs” are shots that have rebounds from multiple players. A player may create a shot and other players may rebound off the initial shot. For example, a shot (seen below) by Geof Crowl from 2010 asks “Which state do you live in?” has had 445 rebounds and over 36,000 views so far. There could be benefits for players who open up such playoffs as people who come across rebounds can be led back to the original shot and could lead to an increase in awareness of a designers work.

Geof Crowl’s initial shot.

Members are also able to curate other players shots into “Buckets” or a collection of shots.

A project is a collection of a players shots that have been grouped, often sharing a common theme. Only members with Pro accounts are able to create projects but they are viewable by anyone. For example, Johnathon Ogden, from earlier has collected his work into a Project called Rivers and Robots, a project surround music that contains logo designs, album covers and websites.

Giving constructive feedback to others is not an outright goal of Dribbble, they are more oriented towards the ‘show and tell’, however they do have a Player’s Handbook that details rules and tips for “being a good team player in the community” so in some sense, the site does encourage good feedback.

Forrst

Forrst is a community where (again) you have to request an invite to participate in the network. If someone invites you to the community, they are vouching for your dedication and ability to expand the community and make valuable contributions. Forrst is different from the likes of Behance, which is more portfolio oriented, because it is focused more on the sharing of ideas and obtaining constructive answers to questions. It is more discussion oriented.

It’s a place where designers, engineers and developers can share their work and get the feedback they need. They can learn from each other what it means to give feedback and give it effectively. All with the goal of getting better at their craft.

With 50,000 members, Forrst goals are concerned largely with feedback;

1. To listen, participate and foster a healthy design community
2. To build the design community’s involvement on Forrst
3. To position the community around quality and actionable design feedback

Sharing on Forrst is done through four ways; questions, snaps, code and links. Works-in-progress can be posted to gain feedback. Reputation is a percentile attached to a member that shows the measurement of a members’ activity and engagement on Forrst. The higher your reputation score, the more active and engaged you have been in the community. Members achieve higher reputation not only by posting, liking and commenting but also by having these posts and comments liked. The percentile also is affected by the behaviour of the members that you have invited.

Tweets by forrst

Hunie

Hunie is a community where creatives collaborate through constructive peer-to-peer critiques.

Hunie’s byline is “Collaborate to learn and improve.” This network is an invite only community where members collaborate through constructive critiques intended to help improve their work. This is a shift beyond counting the ‘likes’ and ‘appeciations’ to gain valuable critiques. The site encourages designers to give valuable critiques beyond the “OMG, cool” and allow for collaboration with peers at a professional level. While this site seems fairly exclusive, it adds to the credibility of the feedback as designers will be dealing with a other professionals, not bystanders. Therefore the quality of feedback is deemed to be high. Jordan Koschei, who wrote this article in March about updates to Hunie, has said,

“after a few months of data, I can confirm that the general tenor of the feedback is high. Comments tend to be respectful and on-point, and it looks like the site is fulfilling its goal of providing a framework for healthy design criticism.”

Idea behind Hunie is to “leverage the knowledge base” that both designers have to improve and learn. Hunie attempts to create an engaged community that fosters “a culture of learning that goes beyond academic settings”. As seen in the demonstration video below by founder Damian Madray, critiques can be given to specific parts of a design (like annotations) which initiates a conversation between designers as they share insights. Other designers can join the discussion thread that is relevant to that particular part of the design. Additionally, critiques can be upvoted if it is seen as valuable to the designer and other designers. Similarly designers can be rewarded through a points system if the design uploader agrees with the critique and decides to implement an idea in the newer version. These updated versions are tracked on the site as the designer uploads a newer version.

Hunie’s expertise system revolves around karma, which can be gained by voting on designs and providing feedback. The more karma you accrue, the better your reputation, and the more heavily your feedback will be weighted by the community.

In this interesting Designmodo interview with Madray from March, he mentions that the community, 3 months after the relaunch, “had 1500 designers and 14K critiques … with 90% constructive rate. On average, every design receives 3 critiques from at least 1 designer.” Today there have been 36,930 critiques given. An excerpt from the interview can be seen below which outlines Madray’s views on Hunie’s point of difference to other design communities.

What was it that you felt other communities lacked that Hunie provides so well?
They lack a culture where designers can leverage each other’s knowledge to further improve their own craft. Design is a craft of constant learning. To date, other communities focus on learning through inspiration but it’s not an intentional goal. It’s what we as designers make of it. Designers look at the work of others and we learn. What other communities lack is the why. Why did you do this vs. that. By looking we copy what’s at the surface level but rarely understand the reason behind the choice.

Hunie aims to solve this because as you borrow these design choices, those very designers and others can tell you whether or not you’re using it wrong. Designers stand to learn. This is what Hunie is doing and doing fairly well since we relaunched.

In other communities, there’s lack of culture that focuses on teaching and learning but what exists is one where it’s focused on likes, views and follows. There’s nothing wrong with this but it’s exactly where we seek to be different.

Despite how new the network is, Hunie is shaping up to be a great network for informal learning.

Hunie is not a marketplace, it’s not another showcase or portfolio site, it’s simply put – a place for designers to teach, learn and improve. That’s our prime directive. – Damian Madray, 2013.

Tweets by hunieco

https://www.facebook.com/huniecreatives

Conclusions

While Behance is the most accessible in terms of getting started and gaining access to the network, it is limited in the quality of feedback, with designers receiving ‘appreciations’ or comments such as “wow” rather than constructive feedback. Despite it being not geared towards feedback, it’s value can be seen in its widespread use as a portfolio website and port-of-call for companies looking to hire talent.

Dribbble, operating as a ‘show and tell’ has some merits as a learning network and while the comments section does allow for conversations between designers to occur, but you would have to sift through the throwaway comments to find valuable feedback. Dribbble’s strengths in my opinion is in its ability to provide inspiration and to see a designers process as they work through a project.

Forrst, is again restricted in terms of entry, with having to provide an external portfolio (e.g. a Behance profile or personal website) to prove your worthiness as a member of the community. The reputation percentile also has benefits for highlighting valuable community members.

Hunie appears to be the network that designers could gain the most use from as a learning network. It’s main objective is to obtain peer feedback to learn and improve. The annotations to specific parts of a design allow for designers to share insights with one another and make suggestions for improvement. Additionally, the Karma points system regulates the quality of feedback as members with high Karma can be seen as credible sources of feedback and criticism. While entry is restricted to some degree, I think it is necessary to ensure the quality of critiques. Hunie seems to align with predictions made in a 99U article about the creative community that say,

“Feedback exchange is extremely important, but the merits of a more private and controlled environment will shine through. In the future, these exchanges will continue but in a different, more private forum, with carefully curated participants.”

I believe a combination of these networks will help me to improve as a designer through informal learning and help share my work with the rest of the online world.

A Side Note: Getting Attention

While Behance is the most accessible network to enter, it is important that your work is noticed, especially if you want to get paid for your talents. Tim O’Reilly has pointed out, for most creatives obscurity is a greater threat than piracy.

The online world is an attention economy. Attention is finite, and therefore scarce. So if you want people to pay attention to you, you need to earn it. – Mark McGuinness

Some argue that there are advantages of giving away parts of your work for free, or licensing it through Creative Commons that allow for other people to share, reuse, or remix it (Behance allow for Creative Commons licences to be attached to your work). Dribbble allows for a variation of this within their network with the ‘Playoffs’ concept, if people come across the rebounds, they can be led back to the original ‘shot’.

An example of companies allowing others to riff off their work is Carly Rae Jepsen’s song Call Me Maybe. William Allen draws upon the video remixes of the song during his article on FastCoDesign, When Your Fans Hack Your Brand, Praise Them. It was these variations that led to a greater awareness of the original. So while the song sits high in my top five list of most despised songs of 2012, I could probably recite 80% of the lyrics back to you.

Stealing is wrong. But what about remixing a brand’s intellectual property for noncommercial use? My favorite version of “Call Me Maybe” is a cover (performed by Cookie Monster, no less); remixes are what propelled this song to ubiquity. Wise companies know that such homages are the world’s most (cost) effective advertising. And the wise will be rewarded with higher sales, greater mindshare, and a deeper affinity from their fans. I call that winning.

Another example of the duality of reusing and/or remixing is the Game of Thrones characters that have been re-imagined in the 1980’s and 1990’s by illustrator Mike Wrobel. These images have been posted on many blogs, increasing the awareness of both Mike Wrobel’s work and the Game of Thrones television series.

References

Sloep, P., & Berlanga, A. (2010). Learning Networks, Networked Learning.

Featured image: created on www.zefrank.com/scribbler/