Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Jan Losert

About a month ago I was invited to the first Dribbble meetup in Bratislava, Slovakia. Along with two fellow designers we spoke about leveraging social platforms in a way that we can benefit from them the most. From sharing our work, building a community, to getting new clients and much more. In my talk I shared my point of view on the topic of Life behind 15K on Dribbble & Instagram.

All Slides on Slideshare: https://www.slideshare.net/JanLosert/the-key-to-gaining-15k-followers-on-dribbble-instagram

A quick word about who I am. I’m self taught designer who’s goal when 17yo was to learn how to photomanipulate pictures of himself and the girls he liked. As you can see I didn’t stop there thought. When I was 19yo I took on a first full time gig in Czech analytics company called Socialbakers. I was pretty impressed at that time while I was still living with my parents. That all changed only a year after when a design job at Badoo came in and I moved all by myself to London. Year after that I met 3 guys working on a mobile ads platform called Tapdaq. Ever since then I’ve been working with them as the only designer in the company. Heads down in pixels with our dashboard, landing page or investor pitch deck. During that journey I shared my designs on Dribbble where you might have seen some of shots (Hint: They are all blue) or you might have used some of my digital product such as Dashboard UI Kit or Symbols & Styleguides.

Nowadays I’m passionate about occasionally sharing photos of my table and my designs on Instagram.

https://www.instagram.com/janlosert

So far this has lead me to these 2 numbers.

But enough about me. 👏🏻 Slow clap for the longest intro to a Medium article. I chose this topic mainly because of the massive interest I’ve been receiving on Instagram regarding how to become a designer or gain followers.

It’s interesting to see how many people are studying e.g. computer science but they’re not happy and they would like to shift their path and be like me. Which I still find slightly crazy when I consider what my life really is all about.

But let’s go back to where it all began for a sec. When I started designing I thought the only thing you need is the “designer’s starter kit” = Facebook Fan page — “Your name — Designer”, Thunderbolt Display, Moleskine and Macbook. And then obviously buying tons of design/productivity books which you’ll never read.

To my surprise none of this really helped my career. And trust me I tried hard and bought all of those things. If you have some machine to work on that’s already enough (amen). You don’t need to have a degree or own a fancy Mac to get started. Fun fact: I was actually crafting all my designs on Windows for the first 3–4 years, we even had Win in Socialbakers. And it doesn’t matter if you’re using Photoshop or Sketch or XD or whatever Figma is. The most important is…

…To comment on everyone’s posts and invite them to check out your designs on Dribbble or Behance. No, but seriously.

The only thing you need to do to be a better, best or a superstar designer is to Work, Work & Work.

If you succeed you’ll be lead to the life you dreamed about which is actually going to look like this:

This image nicely illustrates the real days & nights of a designer. No matter if the guy in a black robe is a client, a side project or some ridiculous daily challenge.

And that’s basically it. The only whay how to get the keen numbers and be the best designer out there is to work. I’m so surprised by the amount of questions I get all the time about this topic. And even more by people’s expectations of what magic formula I’m gonna send them in my response. I’m not sure if they expect me to send them a link to a video how to become a dribbble superstar in 4 weeks or getting 150 work inquiries by posting 2 dribbble shots. That’s sadly not gonna happen to any of us. There are no shortcuts that I know about.

On the other hand what I do know about a few basic techniques which I trained over the years that help you become the searched and followed.

The first key is to be different. Design wise. And often as a person as well, because working your butt off (keeping it PG) will usually change you from a human being to a robot. But how? What do I mean by being different or the best?

This works for me and for all the other guys on dribbble/instagram who are well known for their major skill. This goes obviously hand in hand with them keeping their portfolio in shape and underlining what they are good at. Let me show you that on a couple of examples.

https://dribbble.com/janlosert

I’m usually known on Dribbble as the Dashboard guy.

https://dribbble.com/mstrba

If you take a look at Martin Strba’s profile you’ll quickly see that he’s the fancy gradient website/landing pages wizard.

https://dribbble.com/creativemints

Or if you come across the profile of Mike Creative Mints you’ll see that this guy is insane at everything. You’ll probably give up on each of your life expectations and move to the Marketing department next day. I still wonder what kind of creative mints is he taking 😀

My point here is: Find your strong side and give it all your time. And work on it. Master it. I believe my life and my work is another great example of why that is so important.

2 years ago I knew I had enough of working only on client’s stuff. Not only we usually ended up with something which wasn’t exactly the best result I wanted to share. But also at that point I was already receiving most of the work inquiries for dashboard redesigns so I decided to create a package that will help me to easily shape client’s requests without remaking the same design fundamentals over again. Basically to make myself a little dashboard factory.

3 months later we (my GF helped a lot) released a UI Kit called Dashboard UI Kit.

http://janlosert.com/store/dashboard-ui-kit

We released this 67 screens package early in 2016 and I can really say that it changed my life. And not really by helping me to become the keen factory but by that fact that Dashboard UI Kit started living it’s own life. On this slide you can see a graph of revenue of my 5 products. What makes me happy is that even after 2 years I still receive emails about how my product helped some companies or individuals to quickly develop their MVP or how they over night designed their client’s projects.

At the moment of release there was nothing like it. No web app focused design resource and to this day there are only few packages focusing on dashboards (usually just a copycats of my designs). The point I’m trying to make is that just by releasing something that specific and focused on one design segment I was able to generate solid passive income and become known for my “strong side” skills.

So with all that said now you know that you need to identify your strengths. Let’s focus on the content and part 3 — Consistency.

Why do people visit your dribbble profile? Because they probably find your work on the popular page or via search. And if they like what they see at first they’ll probably want to see more. Which will lead them to browse through your work to see if your skillset matches their needs. So for example if they are looking to redesign their landing page they will be hungry to see how your approach this particular field.

And not surprisingly same goes for your followers. Producing similar styled designs and pics works. People want their feed filled with what they like and content similar to that in order to get inspired. This nicely works for us as a creators of that content. We don’t really have to overthink our pictures and shots. After some time you can easily tell what type of content works and what your audience is looking for.

Couple of examples:

https://dribbble.com/anwaltzzz

Alexander Zaytsev who goes by the nickname @anwaltzzz and this slide is a nice showcase of consistency. The same design just slightly changed over and over again. (Showing how it looks on iPhone, Android, iPad, new iPhone, white iPhone, Rainbow iPhone…) Crazy right? He’s been doing that with the one design for over 4 years. 17000 followers, famous for dark UI.

https://dribbble.com/NpaulFlavius

The next example is the guy who started — for me still an unbelievable — Daily 100 UI Challenge on Dribbble. To be honest, I do hate the fact that someone spends 100 days just posting random stuff, such as a design of a keyboard for no clear reason, without any expectation, just likes. But it worked. He turned himself into rocket and went from 2K to 15K in those 100 days. Something that took me 7 years 😅 His followers were waiting for his new shot everyday and using that as inspiration to start creating their own conceptual keyboards or confirmation popups etc. Anyway…

https://www.instagram.com/symmetrybreakfast

The next example is from Instagram, where you can see thousands of profiles with consistent grid. This particular is one of my favourites. A couple that shares their amazing breakfast everyday. Always with a different type a cuisine but as you can see always the same consistent style of the picture. 770000 followers.

https://www.instagram.com/codingblonde & https://www.instagram.com/themaxsandelin & https://www.instagram.com/chibianward

The following examples are the ones which I personally like, follow and read. Accounts that share their daily life struggles, wins and losses. By sharing pictures of their workspace or things they created they take you on a journey through their life progress. It’s almost like a daily pic reality show.

https://www.instagram.com/janlosert

This brings us back to me. Last year I decided to delete all my travel photos and focus only on the design side of my life. I started a 150 days challenge. I promised myself to share what are my plans and do daily standups every single day on Instagram. I started growing a community around my account. The difference is really visible in the likes count between the day 1 and day 150. I grew my following from 2900 to 8700 followers in 150 days. I was also pretty much forced to work hard on my side projects & client stuff in order to be actually able to share something.

Even that we’re all learning and hearing everywhere how people don’t read websites and emails this is an example of the reality being different. People love to stalk others. To my surprise people actually do read my short Instagram posts. It started many conversations in DM, on email or in real life about topics I shared in some of posts. I was really surprised about the amount of people you can actually influence by just sharing stuff from your life.

Don’t forget to share your process as well. Frankly the process is usually much more interesting the the actual result. You can do it in the same way as I did. By writing small descriptions on Instagram posts, twitter tips or by sharing your whole journey. I was blown away when my article “26 Steps of Product & Dashboard Design” got over 2400 recommendations on Medium and was between TOP 100 most popular articles for more than a week. In the article I shared step by step how I go from a paper and pen to design or which plugin I use in Sketch. All of this can nicely connect your social presence. From posting your work results on dribbble, writing about the progress on Instagram and then sharing the whole journey on Medium. (And you can still connect other platforms such as Youtube, Twitch etc.)

So… Let’s get a quick recap. To get those 15000 followers, you only need to start sharing what you’re working on everyday, get a decent full time job, work on as many client jobs as you can, sell and create your own produ…

A then you’ll probably feel like this.

Even if you have a relatively big number next to your name all social networks and dribbble especially are still very tough. You can easily post a shot that will receive 30–40 likes even when you’re over 15000 followers. So the uncertainty is there regardless if you have 500 or 30000 followers.

Fun fact: Dribbble is an amazing tool for instant feedback (or we can call it user/bug testing/reporting). People just love to tell others what is broken where on which browser, so you can really easily get an instant report about all non functioning stuff.

As I mentioned first it’s all about the amount of work that you do. What makes you a good designer is the work that you put out there. In the end our lives are basically some kind of a weird SEO. It’s all about how many backlinks you can collect to your profile, name or products. Your work might be found through sites that you never heard of but someone shared it there for you.

Last thing: Obviously all of this is hard and if you’re at the beginning of your career it’s even harder. You’re probably not floating in client projects of your dreams. We’ve all been there and sometimes still are. So here are few tips for you to wrap this up.

Concepts still work. I still see them everyday on dribbble. But when you decide to create a conceptual work, think about it. Think about it the same way as you would think about your client gigs. Don’t just create yet another wikipedia homepage redesign. Try to really lay down a couple of pages (4–6) and think about different interactions on each of those pages. So when someone in the future asks, you can actually talk about your design decisions.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-optimal-day-of-the-week-and-or-time-of-the-day-to-post-a-shot-to-Dribbble

Don’t forget to share your stuff at the right time, on dribbble it is the morning time in Europe on Monday to Thursday. That way Europeans will see your shot during their morning commute or breakfast, Asia during the lunch break and after being in the game for already around 5–6 hours you’ll hit US people browsing in the morning. I haven’t done this differently since 2012. Instagram has a nice table/graph in their analytics so you can easily tell which days and times work the best.

And remember — we all started at a 0, I also had 100 followers at some point and was happy for 15 likes. Dribbble is an amazing platform which helped me to get all of my 4 full time jobs, promote my stuff and get me most of my clients in the past 6 years. There is a growing number of articles how Dribbble is broken and how hard it is to be on the Popular page. (Update: With the recently improved Onboarding flow based on picking a few of trending designers I slightly agree that dribbble is getting bit hard. The gap between people with 5K+ and those who’re starting is getting a bit wider. But not impossible to overcome.)

And as a goodbye… Work on client gigs and side projects that are moving you to next level and where you’re learning new techniques. I’m hearing more and more from people that are stuck in jobs where they can’t share anything due NDA or because the lack of sharable quality. Work and help clients where the client will be glad for a free promo on your networks. Because that’s the best quality proof you can give, by sharing the real stuff you’re proud of. Nobody would post projects where they didn’t like the results.

Have fun, thanks for reading and happy followers hunting 🙌🏻

I also read this article and share a bit more in my Instagram Live which you can re-watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bofl04sKcX0

Your passion: The key to gaining 15K+ followers on Dribbble & Instagram. was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Your passion: The key to gaining 15K+ followers on Dribbble & Instagram.

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