For those of you who aren’t familiar, Dribbble.com is a social network dedicated specifically to designers and basically allows them to geek out over design.

To quote their “About”:    

What are you working on? Dribbble is a community of designers answering that question each day. Web designers, graphic designers, illustrators, icon artists, typographers, logo designers, and other creative types share small screenshots (shots) that show their work, process, and current projects. Dribbble is a place to show and tell, promote, discover, and explore design.

In addition to the above awesomeness, Dribbble also sponsors Meetups for designers to socialize, talk shop and nurture  their local design community. So we thought, “Hey, we want in on this!” As a small design firm that’s growing each and every day, we thought it would only make sense to open our doors to the Atlanta design community and make some new friends.

Turns out, there are a lot of really cool people in the Atlanta design scene. We kept the event pretty casual, getting to know people while sharing stories and design tips over beer and pizza. We honestly thought that maaaaybe  20 people would show up. We ended up having around 70 people come! How amazing is that?

We went through 13 cases of beer, 10 pizzas, 60 t-shirts, 40 coozies and, of course, a plethora of Dribbble-related swag items. Someone even told us that we had the most swag-tastic event she  had ever attended (we thought that was a win).

Back when we first decided we wanted to host our Meetup on January 27th, we realized that the day after — January 28th — is National Have Fun at Work Day. Seriously, Google it. Since Make Time for Fun is one of our core values, we knew that we HAD to embrace this day, so we took it upon ourselves to print out Official Task Lists for Fun to hand out at our Dribbble event. The idea was simple: check off as many tasks as possible on Have Fun at Work Day, then share it on social media using the hashtag #MakeTimeForFun. The details of the awesomeness that ensued deserve a whole other blog post (coming soon!), but thanks to our friends at Dribbble, we had some cool prizes to give to people who totally rocked it out in the fun department.

Overall, we thoroughly enjoyed hosting a Dribbble Meetup and felt incredibly inspired after meeting so many amazing people (some of whom we now work with on a contract basis — yay networking)! We were thrilled to be able to get our name out there in the community and promote all things fun, which is always, well, FUN! Stay tuned, for more events that we are planning to put together soon!