Dribbble Meetup №1 in Moscow

On April 20, the first Russian Dribbble Meetup took place in Moscow. At this informal conference for designers a dozen of strong and interesting experts presented in one of the main thematic social networks Dribbble . They are Alisher Yakupov (Classmates), Denis Pakhalyuk (Ramotion), Pavel Grozyan and Sergey Kudryashov (MacPaw), Dmitry Provotorov (Manufactory), Igor Stepakhin (Fidel Solutions), Roman Khramov (Cuberto), Alexander Kirov (Mail.Ru Group), Sergey Rachok and Vitaly Trikoz (SODA). There were many practically useful stories and stories from the life of companies with a lively and cheerful dialogue with the audience.



Dribbble was created by Dan Cederholm , founder of the American design studio SimpleBits . It’s not easy to get an invitation to publish your work on Dribbble and, as a result, the site has a huge amount of high-quality works and the best designers from around the world. People from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Apple, Google, HTC, Path, Instagram, Dropbox, Pinterest and many other well-known companies show their current tasks. Our team at Mail.Ru also publishes its groundwork in the course of redesigning the company's products and creating new services.
')
Meetings of the Dribbble participants are held around the world and my colleague Oleg Andrianov has long wanted to hold a meeting in Russia. So together we got the support of the Mail.Ru Group and the Dribbble itself and started the preparation. I wanted to gather practical designers working on spectacular modern websites, icons, mobile applications and web services. And those that are not usually represented at conferences. In Russia and Ukraine there are a number of strong teams that work, among other things, with Western customers and sell their own products. Cuberto (St. Petersburg), Fidel Solutions (Moscow), MacPaw (Kiev), Ramotion (Sevastopol), SODA (Kiev), Manufacture (Voronezh) were able to arrive at the Moscow mitap.

The first speaker was Alisher Yakupov , who talked about creating a new application for Odnoklassniki . The product has a strong design team, which Alisher has been developing for several years already, and a well-established work process. They offered a game-based approach to the tagging service on photos instead of administrative-like, and made it look spectacular and modern. Unfortunately, the presentation is not yet available for publication - the mentioned service has not yet been launched.



Next was Denis Pakhalyuk from the Sevastopol studio Ramotion . He spoke about the Pick'n'Roll iPad application for working with Dribbble - how and why it was created, why it turned out that way. After that, Denis separately went through the process of creating icons in the company.



Pavel Grozyan and Sergey Kudryashov from MacPaw Kiev continued the story about the products. They were preparing to launch the Clean My Drive application in addition to the already known Clean My Mac . Therefore, they talked about how they were working on it and how product creation and development differs from a custom project in general.



Speeches from designers from grocery companies and studios alternated and Dmitry Provotorov from Voronezh Manufactory followed. He spoke about how the company monitors trends and, thanks to frequent experiments, they manage to keep up with them and even overtake them. In addition to customized work, Manufactory develops several of its own products, therefore the company’s experience is diverse.



After the break, Igor Stepakhin from Fidel Solutions made one of the most fun and emotional presentations. He talked about how he became a designer, his first company, working at Fidel and their new product, Tracks Flow . It was interesting to look at the successes and mistakes, to see the living personal experience of a strong domestic specialist - it helps a lot to your own professional growth.



The founder of St. Petersburg Cuberto, Dmitry Khramov, replaced Roman's brother who had fallen asleep and told how the company went from a studio specializing in icons to creating mobile applications in all aspects. Among the problems is particularly affected by the lack of designers who are able to create juicy modern icons - this is solved by working with trainees. In addition, Cuberto also moves towards its own products.



My colleague Alexander Kirov from Mail.Ru described the features of working with animation in mobile applications. This is one of the key things in modern products, and given the universal love of using real-world metaphors, it is extremely important to support the behavior of these metaphors.



Sergey Rachok from the Kiev SODA team spoke about how the company works and how it lives. They are engaged in both projects for third-party clients and their own products. Among them is Accordeon for iPad, which came out with the advent of the tablet and was presented by Steve Jobs. And at that time the device was inaccessible and the application was created blindly.



Another SODA designer, Vitaly Trikoz, walked through the process of creating modern pictograms of increased detail. He described techniques for solving specific problems and improving specific elements when working with Adobe Illustrator, although they are applicable to other tools.



In addition to the storytellers, we managed to collect many interesting listeners, including from strong domestic companies and teams. The result was very soulful and fervently - and during the stories, and after the completion of the program.

Interestingly, most speakers talked about their own products. Moreover, even studios are moving in this direction, realizing that these are more interesting tasks and a good source of income. Some narrators showed not yet released products and distributed to the viewers test access to them - TracksFlow from Fidel, Clean My Drive from MacPaw and the new Odnoklassniki service. And before the mitap, some of the speakers had time to participate in a round table, where she briefly spoke about companies and answered questions from visitors at the RIF + CIB conference. Particularly interesting were the nuances of working with Western customers - including thanks to Dribbble, it became much more convenient to find them.

Although Oleg Andrianov and I spent on organizing a hell of a ton of energy and were exhausted in full, the first Russian Dribbble Meetup was very interesting and vigorous. So in the beginning of autumn there will be a continuation of the program with equally interesting designers and stories - watch for announcements on the site and in the Facebook group .

• Version of the report with all presentations (Habr does not support SlideShare);
• Photos from Mail.Ru ;
• Photos from Yury Kopylov ;