Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Vineet Arora

#BLRDribbble–A design meetup that was actually designed well

Just 30 minutes to timeout and 8 pages to design. I was in a complete hurry and stress to make it on time. However, surpassing every other emotion was the excitement–the excitement of being at my first ever Dribbble meetup. It was Saturday, November 18, 2017 and Zeta had organized the second-ever Dribbble meetup in Bengaluru.

Right since the beginning of the last month, numerous designers across India had been on the waiting list of this meetup because all the seats had been filled in the first few hours. I was lucky enough to register for it (thanks to Nikhil Yadav for informing about it). On the morning of this day, when I reached Zeta office, I was given a #blr dribbble passport, with the words “that’s your team–Tribal” printed on it.

The passport that I was given on entering. The one on the right belongs to my teammate Mayank

Collecting these and entering the office, I found an environment full of charm. With brightly painted walls, large pillars, well-lit space, organizers wearing bright yellow T-shirts, and smiling receptionists, everything was welcoming.

Zeta office. Pic credits: Arunkumar Alagarsamy

My first few minutes at the place went into roaming around and occasionally smiling at people. However, it soon became clear that the organizers had put a lot of thought into the proceedings and were not going to let anyone become a wallflower. Saptarshi Prakash (designer at Zeta) jumped onto a bench and announced to everyone that the team name written on everyone’s passport was not unique and there were more people, with the same team name, who had to be searched for. This started a whole new level of interaction in the venue. Everyone got moving around, asking different people their team names, shouting out their own team names, and looking for their teammates.

Soon after everyone had found their teammates, every team was told to occupy one of the desks. I had 9 teammates now none of which I had met before in my life.

Team Tribal: Three members are missing here. Pic credits: Pankaj Sinha

Then the main team activity of the meetup was announced. Every team had to design a board game and had to present it to a panel of judges by the evening.

While all this was going on, Kavan Antani from Indiefolio took a few minutes to present Indiefolio’s upcoming Gmail plugin enabling the designers to create beautiful portfolio emails.

Kavan giving his presentation. Pic credits: Vivek Kumar

Every activity in the meetup was designed carefully to induce interaction among the participants. No monologue, no talks, no lectures. Everyone was supposed to interact with everyone in a dialogue. On everyone’s passport were empty pages where the participants were supposed to get stamps from the organizers for successfully performing on-the-spot tasks during the event. The first on-the-spot task given by the organizer, Taruna, was to memorize and recite the names of all of one’s teammates. The second task was given after about an hour and was to tell one interesting thing about each of one’s teammates. The third one was a doodling task where two people from different teams would start from opposite corners of a whiteboard and doodle towards the center where both of them had to merge their doodles into something that would make sense. The fourth was a doodling dumb-charades (again a team task).

The doodling task resulted in a number of beautiful doodles.

Beautiful doodles by participants at the event. Pic credits, left to right: Ramamurthy K S, Chinmaya Kumar Guru, Sameer Bhiwani

Zeta office was now a place full of designers, creating their best shots. Vibes of creativity could be felt everywhere.

Teams of designers working creating something around. The third one is of my team–Tribal. Pic credits (left to right): Tarun Babu, Parag Nandi, Sayed

Our team brainstormed and decided to build a board game called Spacebusters where four players (aliens) were supposed to reach a planet by throwing a pair of dice (red and green). Their path was full of wormholes (good ones and bad ones) and the teammates could use the number on the red dice to attack and pull any of the other players backwards.

While the concept was simple, the execution was what would make it fun to do. To no surprise, all my teammates were awesome designers and they took a beautiful approach to design this game. Sayed also recorded the whole creation process with his camera.

<a href="https://medium.com/media/3c13812d382cf6e3a0e19e792a00ffd2/href">https://medium.com/media/3c13812d382cf6e3a0e19e792a00ffd2/href</a>

The last task left was to create a rulebook for the game. Although I had taken that task, I was a bit too slow with it. And now, with just 30 minutes to timeout and 8 pages to design, I was in all hurry and stress to make it on time. Pankaj finally came to my rescue and we completed the game.

After the timeout, Saptarshi gathered everyone around a bench and we had a squats competition where one member from each team would compete for doing maximum number of squats. Excited by my recent gym membership, I participated from my team. While the activity was fun, the best part was being cheered by my teammates which fuelled me all the way to the end and I won a prize for being in the ones lasting till the end.

Squat competition going on. That dude in green tee is me. When the prizes were being given, the judge refused to believe I could have done that, given my physique .:P He agreed anyway). Pic credits: mustafaquilon

The presentations

After the fitness competition, the presentations started and all the teams (including ours) presented their games.

Different teams presenting their games. Pic credits (left to right): Vivek Kumar (for the first two) and Sayed (for my pic)

On the one hand, the judges and some of the participants were listening to the presentations. On the other, there were those enjoying playing the games they had created themselves. I used this time to walk around and talk to people, listen to their experiences in the industry, etc.

In the end, the winners were announced. We did not win the competition. But that did not matter anyway. We had already won the best gift we could–new friends. The whole purpose of this meetup was gracefully met. And by the way, everyone was given some awesome goodies. So, nobody returned empty handed.

Goodies given to every participant. Pic credits: Shivansh Singh

Before coming back, I ensured that I met as many people of team Zeta as I could and thanked them individually for making the meetup a great success.

The organizing team. Pic credits: don’t know who. All of them have put it on their facebook covers now 😛

And this was not over. The organizers went one step further to ensure everyone stayed in touch. They added all the participants into a Flock group which will now stay forever and will let everyone contact anyone anytime.

In a nutshell, the meetup was a huge success and I hope to stay connected with all the talented and awesome friends I made there.

Thank you team Zeta for the beautiful meetup. You are awesome.

Also, special thanks to Dhruv Bhanushali for taking care of my grammar and vocabulary.

Dribbble meetup 2017 was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dribbble meetup 2017

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