I was thinking of launching a similar startup in October. I thought of making it easier for designers and photographers to share their work online with their friends, co-workers and people they don’t know in order to receive good feedback. I did some research and spoke to some of my friends online about where and how they share their work.
It turns out that designers don’t really like feedback from other designers, at least at the concept stage, since everybody has different tastes. And if you’re quite an experienced designer, you don’t wanna know what others think about your concept, but you do want to get feedback when the project is complete, and that feedback will most of the time be from your clients.
Upon more detailed research of existing websites and startups, I came through quite a good set which let you collaborate on design concepts inside your team, but nobody’s going public. Others were the more popular online-portfolio websites, and only some were quite close to the ideas we initially had. Below is their list with a short description of each.
They’ve quite an interesting concept – Show and tell for designers in 120,000 pixels or less. They don’t allow big images, which makes the pages load much faster and designers concentrate on certain parts of their work. Each “shot” (it’s what they call them) can be tagged, faved and shared on Twitter, which is awesome. Members can leave comments to shots too, which is the actual feedback, then again, most of them are “great work”, “i like it” and so on. Not very useful ;) Dribbble is an invitation-only community, but artwork and comments are public.
Forrst is an invitation-only community and in order to apply you have to show something that you’ve already made. The concept’s quite interesting though: not only you can share screenshots of your work. You can also share pieces of code and interesting links. So this seems to be a closed web designers and developers community. The screenshots show that images, links, questions and code pieces could be “liked”, commented and shared (yeah, you can share it on Twitter, but they have to have an account to view it.)
This is very, very interesting for collaboration inside your team. You don’t get much for the free plan and basic costs $24/month. This is good for companies with design and marketing departments. Their javascript widgets let you leave comments directly on top of uploaded images. They have the ability to comment inside source code, which is great. And as a bonus you can also get a rough SEO report of a certain website and comment inside that report. It seems that Twitter and Mozilla are using Notable.
Bounceapp.com is their sister which lets you grab a screenshot of a website, comment on top of the image and share with your friends online.
It seems to me that everybody is aware of the Behance Network, but unfortunately not everybody is using it to share their work. Since Behance is more of a portfolio, it’s not typical to see design concepts there, but feedback on finished work is as important as feedback on concepts. Although not as exciting ;)
Registration on Behance is private, but if you’ve got some designs to show off already, you can get your invitation in no time.
A Russian website for design feedback. The concept is taken from Artemiy Lebedev’s Business Lynch, hence the name. The community’s not very big and comments are not always decent, but it’s fairly easy to use, there’s a rating system and comments are allowed on top of the uploaded images. This was the closest concept to what I had in mind.
Well, that’s about it I guess. Do you share your work online? Code, design, poetry, music? If you have any other websites worth mentioning here in this list, please let me know via the comments.
