@mnicole, I've been thinking a lot about your feedback and if you have time would really appreciate if you elaborate on your views on attracting worth sellers.
Do you think the one thing that would compel you as a designer to post is quality control? If not, what are the one or two things that would most influence your decision to upload content, in the same way that you do to Dribbble for instance?
mnicole|13 years ago
Knowing there's someone there curating quality stuff is a huge plus, but having a curator that is truly knowledgeable in the industry is preferred. I actually wrote an email to the fine folks at Behance letting them know that their Web Design Served gallery was pretty lackluster considering the talent they have on their site, expecting that there was some sort of algorithm in place that would shuffle content tagged as Web Design over to Served once it hit a certain amount of Likes or if the user has a lot of Followers. To my surprise, they got back to me and told me that their posts are hand-picked by staff members. After that, I lost a bit of faith in the platform and stopped utilizing it as a place I went to (daily) to find inspiration. Clicking through page after page of thumbnails got old and was really time-consuming, and I was hoping a site like The Served would eliminate that work for me, but it had the same problem.
Another thing for me, personally, is I thrive off of competition; it has consistently kept me moving forward and it seems to be the driving force behind a lot of Dribbble trends and rebounds alike. At the same time, as a day-to-day designer, I'm not going to be in the market for assets for most projects so the question becomes "How do you get designers to stick around and contribute to a site they wouldn't necessarily use themselves?" I think an answer to that would be that competitive factor; give them the opportunity to upload and explain changes they made from the original(s) and get real feedback not only from other designers but people that are actually in the market as well. One of my biggest issues with Dribbble is that it can tend to be more of a wankfest than it is a place to get real constructive criticism, and sometimes those criticisms are weak or flat-out misinformed.
I don't know how you monetize off of the concept of designers one-upping other designers to ultimately create a quality pool of assets for people to choose from, but I like the sound of it and will keep thinking about it. :)
Does that help?
cilliankieran|13 years ago
Interestingly some other designers have said that they're looking for 'building blocks' or components to save time in the design process. Do you feel that's an exception rather than the rule and therefore you design absolutely everything from scratch without borrowing inspiration or gathering assets to speed things up? This is really what I'm interested in knowing more about as it's really this insight that to speed up design downloaded assets that are still in layered art format (i.e. a PSD) can help to speed things up? Would love to hear more and incidentally if you could drop me a mail would love to ask you some more questions?
cillian (at) fol (dot) io Cheers.