These are my drawings

With the enshittification of Dribbble marching towards its inevitable conclusion, I’ve decided to stop posting images to that service and instead post them to a new section of my website called Drawings. This is a place where I can share pencil sketches, illustrations and logos, but most likely, mission patches (which I can now also collect separately).

Goodbye Dribbble

Much like when I added my previous posts from This is My Jam to the Jams section of my website, my original intention was to bring across all the previous shots I’d posted to Dribble over the last 15 years.

This made sense for the more recent images, but reviewing older shots took me back to a time when Dribbble was a helpful and lively community, one where I would post images and get feedback not just the occasional like. On a few occasions I used the ‘rebound’ feature to post iterations of other people’s shots with my recommendations. My very first shots were 400×300 crops of design files I no longer have or can open¹.

These earlier posts felt out of place on my own site, so I choose to import a subset of posts instead. While my inner completionist wasn’t too happy, I reminded myself that the goal was not to recreate Dribbble, but to build something for my own purposes.

There’s not too much to say about the implementation, though perhaps it’s worth mentioning why I choose the name ‘drawings’. For the most part ‘design’ may be better suited, but this new section also gives me a place to collect the few sketches I’d previously posted. Who knows, maybe having a new section will encourage me to post many more.

Cool URLs

There is another reason for choosing this name, and perhaps now is a good time to finally write up the URL structure I moved to a few years ago. Largely based on Tantek’s Whistle URL shortening scheme, it means URLs on my site use the format /yyyy/ddd/tn[/slug], where:

• yyyy is the year
• ddd is the day of the year
• t is the post’s content-type
• n is the nth post of that content-type on this day
• slug is optional and can be removed when used

This means that each type of post has to be assigned a letter. So far I’ve assigned the following:

If it wasn’t for s already being assigned to presentations, perhaps I’d have chosen s for ‘screenshots’, but I like where I ended up. Not only does d stand for ‘drawing’ and ‘design’, but it’s also a subtle nod to Dribbble, a soon-to-be forgotten place where a number of these drawings first appeared.