Mumbbbai - The Designer Festival
At 11 am on Saturday, 9th May, the doors to the Crowdfire HQ opened and people started pouring in to attend the first and the biggest ever designer meetup in Mumbai. After planning and coordinating with designers from across India, we had over 80 guests in the Mumbai Dribbble meetup and we named it as Mumbbbai.
Dribbble is a community of designers. It’s more like a show-and-tell for the web designers, graphic designers, illustrators, icon artists, typographers, logo designers across the globe.
We organised Mumbbbai with the sole purpose to bring the designers together and create their first ever community in Mumbai. However, we had a huge challenge lying in front of us. We had to make sure that the meetup was interactive and creative (after all, designers were involved). Luckily, space was not an issue as we had recently moved to a new sprawling office with an area of 10,000 sq. ft. One thing was clear: We did not want the meetup to be all ‘lecture and talks’. We planned some asynchronous events and a small interesting workshop to give Mumbbbai the whole fun festival feel.
As the guests would enter, they would be ushered to a check-in desk where our volunteers would give them a name tag and a colorful band. After registering themselves in the guest-list, they could proceed anywhere.
There were small fun events running in different parts of the office. Near one of the pods (the silent working zone), there was an analog polling booth. There were poll questions like:
Which is better: Photoshop or Sketch?
What do you prefer: Freelancing or Full-time?
People could put balls in the glass tubes that they favoured. The tube with the most balls would win.
There was one more poll: Is #Dribbble #Mumbbbai the shiz? To our happiness, the tube labelled as ‘fuck yeah’ was filled up to the brim.
The guests - shy and awkward at first - loosened a bit after a while. Beer did its magic, I guess! :)
Now now. Where there are designers, there is always drawing or doodling. Hence, there was also a doodling arena where the guests could doodle away and then stick their work on our glass wall. There were little ‘heart’ stickers near the wall and anyone passing by could pick up the stickers and paste it on his/her favourite doodle. The winner would be decided based on the maximum number of hearts.
The glass wall now known as the ‘doodle wall’
However, the most loved part of the event was, undoubtedly, the Photobooth section. There was a frame with the Instagram theme, not to mention the quirky props like colourful wigs, glasses, hats, etc.
The organising team - so unprepared to pose
Near the cafeteria, stood two big canvases as a part of the game called Rebound. People were supposed to draw something leaving enough room for the others to come and do the same and then make a story out of it.
One more thing that made people laugh and gel with others was the small Snapchat workshop. Here, one of the designers volunteered to teach us how we could make use of our doodling skills and enhance our snapchat stories - a fantastic tip for individuals and social channel managers. All we were supposed to do was: Click a picture of the people beside us, doodle on it, and then show it on the projector screen. Believe me when I say this, the results were pretty funny!
Looks like Snapchat brought out the best in everyone :P
No festival is complete without food and music. And boy, the awesome music tracks had everyone grooving with pizza in one hand and a drinks (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) in another. Amidst all the fun, it was amazing to see everyone tweeting and posting about the event - something which we could track because of the unique hashtag #mumbbbai. So many pictures, tweets, updates, and more pictures!
Finally, it was the time to declare the winner. Coming to the analog polling booth, it turned out that Photoshop and freelancing were the most favoured among all the designers present. The people who had voted for these gave out a big cheer - while for the rest - there was more beer! :D
On the other hand, among the doodles, ItsMisterJadhav’s ‘Avengers Assemble’ and KnockedOverArt’s ‘Crowdfire logo’ were declared as winners.
All good things come to an end and so did the event. People came, interacted, danced, exchanged numbers or Twitter handles (that’s what happens nowadays, right?), and then it was time for everyone to leave.
Be it any event, a group picture is a must!
We decided to give the guests something to remember the meetup and us by. We gifted them a Swag Bag containing some cool things like: a ‘Get shit done’ mug, stickers of Dribbble, Mumbbbai and Crowdfire, and a t-shirt with Crowdfire’s infamous slogan ‘Roti, Kapda, aur Social Media’.
It was the first meetup but definitely not the last! Stay tuned for more stories. Signing off!
