The importance of being a part of the design community
For a while now I’ve known that to succeed you need to be around people that enable you and help you in that quest. The design community benefits from this to no end, and because the community is very active on social networking platforms there is no reason not to be part of it.
There are thousands of great designers out there using sites like Twitter and Facebook. Following and contributing to discussions can only help you get out there, get noticed and feel part of the community. I cant tell you the amount of times I’ve come across people that see no point in Twitter until you start mentioning how you’ve received work, gotten help on an issue and so much more. Just take a look at my twitter feed and you’ll see just how many times I ask questions rather than sitting for hours staring at a PHP problem, getting frustrated and having to take time out, I simply put the question on twitter and within a few minutes I have a number of people who know the answer.
Over the past few days I’ve been working on the design for my next ThemeForest theme and throughout the design stage I decided that I would put it up online for people to see, test and give their opinions on (and of course I run Review My Design which serves that purpose as well). I have had a number of people who have been a very important part of the development of the template design, with ideas on backgrounds, colours, alignment, spacing, jQuery effects, fonts etc. and now I’m going into development knowing that the design has been polished and tested.
So the point of this post is really to say that if you don’t use Twitter and you’re a designer, start looking into it and getting involved, there’s no point sitting on the wall about it and saying “I don’t see the point in it” when you haven’t tried it. Being part of a community is so important to succeed, if I wasn’t part of the design community with this blog, my twittering, my themeforesting, my freelanceswitching, my wootheming and everything else I do, then I think I’d still be working my ass at such a low rate and not improving my skills.