Founded in 2009, Dribbble is a community site where designers of all types share their work. It’s a daily source of inspiration where participants can discover new trends in design across a wide swath of disciplines from hand drawn illustrations to web design to video game artwork. It’s a great place for indie developers to find and partner with visual leads. And it’s a wonderful place for anyone interested in design to meet and learn from others in their field of interest. Following is a very small sample of the game-inspired artwork that can be found on Dribbble.
Dribbbler: Rodrigo Bellão
Source: Global Game Jam Wallpaper
Rodrigo created this poster for the 2013 Global Game Jam, an international event where game developers and designers come together for 48 hours and quickly craft games based on a secret theme (unveiled at the opening of the event). He also has concept artwork for FIFA and artwork for several iOS games.
Dribbbler: Johnny Waterman
Source: Digital Materialization
Johnny Waterman is a senior UI artist at Rumble Games, working on the visuals for web-based and mobile games.
Dribbbler: David McLeod
Source: Zelda - A Link to the Twitch
David McLeod works as a designer at Twitch.tv and has worked on several other game-related projects like OpenEMU and the Video Game Archive.
Dribbbler: Michael B Myers Jr.
Source: Pixel Video Game Characters
Pixel artist and illustrator Michael B Myers Jr puts a fresh spin on many classic video game characters like Samus Aran and Gordon Freeman (along with sci-fi characters from Star Wars and Firefly). He also designs great t-shirts themed around video games.
Dribbbler: Robert Podgórski
Source: Scribbles!
Based in Poznan, Poland, Robert Podgórski has a wide variety of game art on display - from retro pixel games to isometric games to sketch games.
Dribbbler: Weasly Grizzly
Source: Zoomed
This Russian pixel artist is a master of isometric views. His work is beautifully crafted, whether it's an animated diorama of a building (seen above) or a pixellated KA-50 Hokum A (Black Shark) helicopter. He's also created some beautiful fantasy elements.
Dribbbler: Mario Sifuentes
Source: Metal
Mario joined Dribbble just a few months ago, but has already posted some great pixel art and artwork for Metal Junk, an iPad game.
Dribbbler: Oleg Milshtein
Source: Velocity-X
Oleg has a really fun style of character design and posted these backgrounds from Velocity-X.
Dribbbler: Christopher Lee
Source: Star Wars - Compendium Poster
Christopher Lee doesn't explicity mention game design, but his character illustrations (see his ThunderCats and Masters of the Universe illustrations as well) and pixel art animations (see It's Ladies Night and One Last Hurrah) are beautiful.
Dribbbler: Creature Box
Source: Giant Clank
Dave Guertin and Greg Baldwin of Creature Box craft beautiful concept and production artwork, character designs, comics, and game artwork and share them on Dribbble.
Dribbbler: Timothy J. Reynolds
Source: Onett [Earthbound]
Milwaukee-based Timothy J. Reynolds doesn't seem to be directly involved in the games industry, but I for one would love to see more of his style of 3D illustration. This shot, inspired by Earthbound, looks even more lovely up close.
Dribbbler: Justin Mezzell
Source: Epic Armory: Lancer
Dribbble also encourages designers to share and challenge each other through impromptu contests (called Playoffs). Some designers have created a recurring series of Playoffs called Epic Armory centered around recreating famous weapons from video games.
Dribbbler: Shaun Inman
Source: Super Clew Land
Web designer turned indie retro game designer Shaun Inman created Super Clew Land with Rusty Moyher and Matt Grimm as part of Ludum Dare, a 72-hour game jam. In December 2012, he successfully kickstarted Retro Game Crunch, an ambitious project to create six retro games in six months with Rusty and Matt. He posts to Dribbble to share his process and progress on new games.
Dribbbler: Andrew Kuhar
Source: The Wind Waker
Not everything game-related on Dribbble involves work on new games by game designers. Plenty of illustrators and designers are inspired by the games they play to create their own illustrations. This beautiful illustration of Link is a prime example.
Dribbbler: Neven Mrgan
Source: The Incident announcement
Software designer for a prominent Mac software company by day, game designer by night. Neven Mrgan did the artwork for the popular iOS game, The Incident, and shared his progress on Dribbble. He is currently working on a new game called Space Age.
Dribbbler: Jake Fleming
Source: Grilly Screen Capture
Illustrator and UI designer Jake Fleming posts great screen captures and artwork for games in progress, including this screenshot from Grilly the Cheese (see the full source for an animated screencast).
Published: May 25, 2013 11:17 am