Engaged community drive product development, create plugin ecosystem, write guides and learning resources. Loyal users help spread the word about the product. This gives dream viral growth, while the company continues building their sticky product.

• DesignBetter learning hub

  The InVision team invested heavily in educational content. Initially, all content was a part of their blog. However, in 2017, things became more structured: InVision launched DesignBetter. This is a collection of design books, podcasts, interviews, and reports. It’s everything needed to educate the creative community and earn a place in user minds.

• The InVision blog initially held hundreds of design articles. In 2018, they restructured this content piece, transforming it into the “Inside Design” blog. This resource contains guides, educational videos, and e-courses. Most of the published articles have been written by designers from the community.

• How to engage with newbie designers?
  
  A glossary of terms is an easy entry point. “Design Defined” is a glossary on steroids, with dedicated articles that cover many terms in design.

• Reports, DS videos, films

  InVision has a strong team behind their educational content, headed by Aarron Walter and Elijah Woolery. They often share videos on Design Systems (DS), hiring reports, documentaries, films & much more. Everything focuses on educating the design community.

• Design Sketch Publication

  The Design Sketch Medium Publication has over 86K readers. It covers design, development, and many Sketch topics. It’s managed by Todor Iliev, who also runs the largest online community for Sketch resources — Sketch App Sources.

  Design Sketch has existed since 2014. There are guides from 378 writers: designers, community leaders, and companies. It’s done by the community, for the community and inspired by Sketch.

• Dozens of Sketch learning sites

  Enthusiasts from the community have made dozens of learning sites around Sketch and design topics.

  It’s a great example of a community creating learning content on behalf of a brand. Most of these sites flourished in 2014-2016 and performed independently (some of them have closed by now). The Sketch team supports many of them, often mentioning the Sketch App Sources site and highlighting projects on social media and in their newsletter.

  This content is totally community-driven, showing how strongly designers have supported Sketch.

• Sketch App Sources content

  Sketch App Sources is a resource hub first. But there you can also find tutorials, articles, and videos. Most of them focus around Sketch, and all this content is created purely by designers from the community. The core Sketch team helps by highlighting and supporting all of these content creators.

• Design courses for beginners

  “Learn Design” is a program by Figma that shows how to use their tool, as well as teaching some design fundamentals. For those new to design, this is a perfect entry point for Figma to build relationships with the user.

• In 2018, Figma launched its own resource of design terms. In addition to writing it themselves, the community could also suggest new terms to the glossary.

• Design Systems (DS) are popular now. Whatever community members want to learn, design companies make it happen. So Figma launched a hub with articles, open-source design systems and a short history of DS.

• Conducting research is a useful way to absorb information from the community, and then give it back. Figma partnered with Clarity conference to analyze the state of Design Systems in companies. After surveying 499 designers, Figma shared their DS report. As you see from the tweet, the community was very excited

• The Marvel team started their blog 5 years ago, and it now it has 533 design-related articles, making it a huge learning resource. The first articles were written by the Marvel co-founder/CEO himself, Murat Mutlu. It’s extremely authentic and grounded for the founder(s) of a large design company to share their knowledge with the community.

• Marvel has released 2 design books so far: Design Systems e-book and the Book of Collaboration. We’re looking forward to seeing the next book in this series!

I think this boils down to three key traits: humility, vulnerability, and kinship. Humility to admit you don’t have all the answers and will make mistakes. Vulnerability to open yourself up to feedback and to regularly engage with your audience.

Kinship in discovering the right things to build in partnership with your community. Simply put: community should be the cornerstone of everything you do. I don’t think that level of care can be faked— it shows in a product builder’s attention detail: their love of craft, the way they interact with their audience, the compassion and sensitivity they show to meeting others’ needs.

Maybe I’m a romantic, but I think this is only possible when walking hand-in-hand with your community and charting the waters of innovation together.

• InVision has been sharing free design resources since 2014. Since then, founder and CEO, Clark Valberg has hunted various InVision UI Kits on Product Hunt. Now their resources hub holds 17 UI Kits, 7 icon packs, and a growing number of mockups kits. Their UI resources are also very comprehensive and well-crafted. They were initially made for Sketch but now are also available in Studio format.

• Design companies attract very talented people to their teams. Those designers create mind-blowing concepts in Studio, and give it away to the community, enabling anyone to play with the source files. Kudos goes to Daniel Korpai and Charles Patterson.

• Sketch App Sources Community

  Sketch App Sources is a community-driven site, covering all the possible resources for design. You’ll find there 2024 UI kits, 222 wireframe kits, 962 icons packs, 117 logos and hundreds of other resources. Need a Sketch plugin or library? It’s all there too.

  Sketch App Sources was born in 2012. Now more than a million people visit this site every month. A tremendous effort from the makers enabled Sketch App Sources to be one of the largest collections of high-quality assets available. It’s a valuable asset for advanced users, newcomers, or designers who just wish to share their work. Kudos to Galya & Todor. While it’s independent project, run by Todor Iliev, Sketch team supports it.

• Sketch enthusiasts have also made resource hubs on their own. Amongst them are Sketch Repo, Sketch Hunt, and Sketch App Rocks. These projects create a huge variety of easily available Sketch resources.

• Figma gathers pre-built design assets made by their team and community members into a community resource hub, born in 2018. The hub contains UI kits, icons and component libraries. It acts as another great way to showcase their users’ work whilst providing value to others.

• Working with fonts and pairing them can be a hustle. To keep users inside their tool, Figma released Google Font type pairing. This is a useful addition for many in the Figma community.

• Craig Wattrus made a Figma resource listing. There, designers can submit Figma UI kits, templates, and design concepts. Another project like this is “FigmaFinder”. We haven’t seen that the Figma team supports such projects from individuals. But this is a seed from which any company could grow a huge tree of love.

• Marvel’s Workshop Kits provide simple processes based on Design Thinking to help companies and individuals create apps, websites, and products. The Kit includes a printable PDF workbook with Design Thinking steps, workshop slides, presentation template slides, and a facilitator guide

• The Marvel styleguide is a live inventory of UI components, brand guidelines, assets, code snippets, developer guidelines, and more. The community can use the Marvel styleguide for free. It’s a wise move to give away assets that you’ve already built, which can be beneficial for other people.

• From time to time you could see Marvel releasing useful resources such as Sketch Pads, free printable templates or design UI kits.

• Figma’s Community Resources Hub collects guides, courses, assets, and extensions made by their users. Figma asks the community over Twitter to submit their resources, but we haven’t found an easy way to do this on the hub itself.

• A great way to create feelings of belonging is by asking people to openly share their beliefs. Figma asked users to tweet #WhyILoveFigma, and made a ‘Wall of Love’ from all the responses. Besides social proof, this can again motivate users to engage more with the Figma brand.

• The Figma community generously share all the gems they find. Just check the #FigmaTip hashtag to see all the useful tips & tricks. Those tips are then curated into a #FigmaTip Roundup blog post. All of this started back in 2017, with the Figma team asking on Twitter: “Do you have tips to share?”.

• Contributing to DesignSystems

  The Design System site allows anyone to contribute and submit an article, DS repository, or historical moments of DS development. Even with this being a learning resource, Figma have also opened the project to contributors.

• Yep, users can also submit design terms to the Figma Design Glossary.

• Talking to Community Leaders

  Within InVision’s books, podcasts, interviews, and webinars you’ll often find opinion leaders or designers from large organisations. Such content drives more attention from readers and helps to build a better relationship with the design leaders themselves. The learning from this is that given the chance, why not ask popular designers to contribute to your company blog?

• Putting users in the spotlight is a good way of giving additional value — positive PR, traffic and recognition. Interviewing users for blogs and podcasts can be a win-win when it comes to community-building tactics. InVision team does it pretty well.

• It’s always exciting to see what users create with your tool. Asking designers to contribute to company activities is a smart strategy! Makers receive attention from brand followers, and the brand gets great visual content from the community.

  Showing cool designs praises talented designers. At the same time, it promotes tool capabilities. Want to get mentioned in the “Studio Smashers” tweets and Medium articles? Just make your design in Studio and share it with the hashtag #InVisionStudio.

• Submitting to Sketch App Sources

  When you open the Sketch App Sources site, there is a prominent call to action: a big pink button, with the text “Submit your resource”. This makes it super easy for makers to contribute their own Sketch resources and help designers around the world.

• Publishing at Design Sketch

  The Design Sketch Medium publication invites anyone that wants to contribute their work to submit an article. The publication itself is a collection of stories and tutorials on designing and prototyping with Sketch and beyond. With 300 writers in their Medium blog, it’s a great place to share your design knowledge and learn from others.

• Motivating the community to organize events

  The Sketch team often ask the community if they’re open to host events or if they want to become a Sketch Ambassador. Also, you can find a clear “Want to host your own event?” button on the Sketch site, but it’s not the main focus of the page.

• Would you like to share your article with a community of 500,000 readers?

  The Marvel blog has a clear call to action on every article: “Contribute to the blog”. Also, folks from Marvel approach writers directly. We got a message over social media to share our articles on the Marvel blog and have published content with them in the past.

• Interviewing Community Leaders

  The Marvel team engage with prominent designers in the community by running interview sessions. They then turn these sessions into blog posts, in a series called “Designers Spilling Tea”.

• “Explore” is a site listing prototypes and designs created by the Marvel community. It was released 3 years ago and users still upload prototypes there. Cool, that Marvel made a dedicated place to showcase their users’ work, and motivate the community to contribute.

• InVision Studio App Store

  In May 2018 InVision announced InVision Studio Platform — an app store, asset library, and open API for Studio. Within their Maker Program, the community could contribute and create integrations, plugins, apps, UI kits, components, icons, and even typography.

  It’s a very logical step to create such an ecosystem around Studio, and encourage the community to contribute. As listed on the InVision site, their Maker Program is officially launching later this year.

• Super rich plugin ecosystem

  Do you know how many plugins are available in Sketch?
  
  The community created 1109 plugins since 2014. An active interest from plugin makers was highly supported by Sketch team from the beginning.

  Now Sketch is famous for its rich plugin ecosystem thanks to all makers who contributed to its development.

• Helping plugin developers

  Making a plugin and have a question? There is a development forum for all plugin makers to get a fast reply from the Sketch team or other makers. If you scroll through the questions, you’ll see how fast, proactive, and helpful the community are! As well as this the Sketch team run an active Slack community to support developers working on new plugins and extensions.

  Such community support is a great catalyst to plugin development, which is beneficial for all users and the company itself.

• Would you like to personally meet with Sketch founder Pieter Omvlee, Framer founder Koen Bok or Abstract founder Josh Brewer? Then you could attend Sketch Plugin Hackathons, where all these awesome people were speakers. It was 2017, and the caliber of the speakers tells for itself how important it was for the Sketch team to support plugin makers.

• Awesome Sketch plugins lists

  The Sketch team made an open-source list of all the Sketch plugins and plugin requests from the community. This is maintained by Ale Muñoz.

  In 2014-2016, Sketch plugin directories had been very active. Making plugins back then was popular. Now supporting Sketch via a plugin is a normal workflow for many tools. This wouldn’t have been possible had Sketch not invested their time in the maker community.

• Plugins are coming to Figma

  Figma started their plugin push by inviting users to join their beta program for building Figma plugins. The official launch was on August 1st.

• In July this year, Figma introduced the developer beta for plugins. Before the official release, Figma proactively asked developers to share their plugins on Twitter using #FigmaPlugin hashtag. That’s a great way to motivate the community and build their plugin ecosystem.

• Understanding the vast potential of a maker ecosystem, Marvel announced its API back in May 2018. It’s a platform for the community to build features, integrations and even apps on top of Marvel. This way, Marvel empowers creators to build more things with the Marvel brand in mind.

• The Marvel API is open and some products have already been built! As a motivation, Marvel shared cool integrations with all their community over Twitter, and on the Marvel blog. Helping makers to get extra attention is a kind move, which is useful for both parties.

• Listening requests at Spectrum

• Talking to users at Community forum

• Answering questions over Twitter

• Listening requests at Spectrum

• Answering questions over Twitter

• Talking to community on Facebook

• Answering questions over Twitter

• Listening requests at Spectrum

• Answering questions on Twitter

• Talks at design conferences

  Conferences are designed for networking and meeting with the community. Some designers from InVision attend conferences as speakers, guests or jury. At the conference it’s easier to chat with the community in a friendly atmosphere.

• InVision made something called the Design Leadership Forum. It brings together industry veterans and design leads/directors. For those members, the InVision team organizes dinners, community meetups, and retreats.

• As InVision explains: “Design Exchange is an opportunity for senior designers from the world’s leading companies to experience a new city through the lens of design.” We haven’t attended Design Exchange, but it sounds good as a traveling and networking program under the InVision umbrella.

• Sketch meetups, really global

  We met Galya and Todor from Sketch App Sources in 2015, when we’d just started Flawless App. They ran the first-ever Sketch meetup in Ukraine. Now Sketch lists 103 local meetups all around the world.

  Sketch also partners with design-oriented companies. One example is MacPaw in Ukraine, who then organized Sketch meetups on their behalf.

• Helping community in offline

  At that Ukrainian meetup in 2015, Galya and Todor did us a favor. We asked if they could share a few words about our new tool. Flawless App was just a concept in 2015, but they still announced it to all the design community in the room. We were very happy!

  Now having our own huge community and several released tools, we still remember how important it is to help. Those small favors make all the difference.

• Talks at design conferences

  The Sketch founders gave dozens of talks, presentations, and workshops at designer and developer events. To mention a few: FrenchKi, NSConference in the UK, CocoaHeads, Dribbble meetup in Copenhagen, and BubbleConf in Amsterdam. You can also meet Galya and the rest of the community team at many design events in the USA or Europe.

  As you know, Sketch was founded in 2010. So they have had plenty of time to build relationships with design conferences.

• How to empower a community to connect in person more often?

  In 2018, Figma introduced “Local Communities”. At its gatherings, people can connect, learn and share. Over 30 local user groups in different countries make up Figma’s Local Communities, as highlighted on their site. The cool thing is that the Figma founder sometimes speaks at these events.

• Figma helped organise and sponsor design system meetups in 8 cities around the world. It brought many designers interested in DS together under Figma brand.

• Have a fancy office in San Francisco? Great! Just invite all the community to your space. Figma was running design meetups, office hours, “happy hours”, light talks, fun design activities and much more.

• Talks at design conferences

  The Figma founder, Dylan Field, attended and gave a talk at the “Ladies that UX” Amsterdam community, FIGS workshops, Loom’s internal hack week, WeAreDesignX and many others. Such an active presence in the community is very beneficial for the company.

• 34 InVision team members contribute to their Dribbble profile, followed by 147K people. They share product designs, UI Kits, animations, illustrations and many beautiful things made in Studio. Without a doubt, Dribbble is a perfect place to visually engage with the creative community. That is what InVision does well.

• Launching on Product Hunt

  Clark from InVision probably has a lot of love for Product Hunt. The InVision founder has submitted 64 products there! Launching on Product Hunt is a great way to get feedback and have a friendly conversation. So you’ll see most of InVision new products, research and learning resources there.

• Talking to community at Designer News

  The InVision team members are also actively chatting with designers on Designer News (DN). Not only to share product updates, but to reply to critics, feedback, or questions.

  Stephen Olmstead is one of the first to answer InVision-related comments on DN. Besides holding an executive position Stephen is always at hand to chat with the community.

• Joining forces with existing design community

  In 2016, the Muzli team joined InVision. We read the Muzli Medium blog and admire their community-driven content approach. The Muzli founders, Eyal Zuri and Ohad Aviv, put a lot of effort in nurturing their own design community, which organically became part of InVision.

• Supporting design conferences

  InVision also supports design conferences as a sponsor. Sponsorship is a way for conferences to provide better content for the community.

• Dribbble x Sketch meetups

  The Sketch team partnered with Dribbble to run design meetups. Later on it, this became mainstream. Local designers started organizing “Dribbble x Sketch meetups”. As perks, the community received Dribbble invites, Sketch licenses, swag, snacks and drinks. This is a great example of a symbiosis of Dribbble and Sketch brands.

• Partnering with App Camp For Girls

  App Camp for Girls is a one-week summer day program encouraging people to design and build apps. In 2017, Sketch contributed revenue from selling their T-shirts to support App Camp for Girls.

  Sketch have also continued to support them in various ways. This is great for the community, and good for the Sketch brand.

• Partnering with other design companies

  For some time, the competition in the design space wasn’t as hot as it is now. Back then, design companies were partnering with each other.

  Speakers from Sketch were giving talks together with folks from Framer, Marvel, Abstract, and InVision. It was a good chance to get access to the design communities of other companies.

• Supporting design conferences

  Since 2010 Sketch were one of the most active to support many design conferences out there. Their team gave free licences, swag, financial support and attended events as speakers.

• Talking to Dribbble designers

  How to reach out to designers on Dribbble? A great way is to give interviews on Dribbble’s official podcast! This is such a smart tactic from Figma to grab the attention of the creative community there.

• Launching on Product Hunt

  Figma has also been launching on Product Hunt since 2016. As you’ll see, they have a lot of fans out there.

• Cooperation with universities

  The design class at UC Berkeley and Stanford were using Figma. The team behind Figma visited students and Figma designer, Rasmus Andersson, made a talk there. Nurturing loyalty starting from the university is a wise approach.

• Supporting design conferences

  Figma partnered with Clarity, the design systems conference, offering scholarship tickets. Also, they sponsored other design conferences, such as Vectors in San Francisco, Design Systems in London, and Layers in San Jose.

• As well as many creative folks in our community, everyone in Flawless team are huge Product Hunt fans. The Marvel founder himself is also pretty active on Product Hunt.

  Murat Mutlu hunts not only Marvel products but also tools and resources from the community. For example, he hunted Prototypr.io, a popular design resource and Planable, a cool marketing tool made by our friends. You can often see Murat commenting products there too. Such a proactive approach from Murat makes Marvel a good citizen of Product Hunt community. That pays back every time they launch something Marvel-related.

• The Marvel team pays a lot of attention to their Dribbble account. You can see shots from Marvel designs for blog posts, learning resources, books, and products. Everything is colorful and trendy. No wonder the Dribbble community actively comment on their shots.

• Sometimes you can meet team members from Marvel at DevelopHer in London, ReactLondon and even at hackathons. Marvel tries to keep a presence in the London tech community when it can.

• Many InVision designers actively tweet about Studio, share Studio tips, and beautiful designs done there. Such active support not only comes from InVision designers but from their top management. You can often see Stephen Olmstead, Chief of Staff, actively chatting with the community.

  When company employees bring value here and there, it builds trust and spreads the company brand within the community.

• Listing community activities on site

  Maybe you noticed Community section on InVision site. It mentions webinars, programs for design leaders and InVision fund. But we already know that InVision community-building activities are much broader.

• Who doesn’t like swag?

• Listing community activities on site

  Sketch mentions its Medium blog, Facebook group, developer forum and all meetups.

• Hiring a community manager

  After working for 3 years on Sketch App Sources, Galya Iliev joined Sketch in 2015. Since then the Community Team has grown and now Galya Iliev, Patrick Hill and Valentina Colombo drive the development of the Sketch community.

• Putting Sketch sites in one place

  As we mentioned already, Sketch users are very creative and active. They make a lot of plugins, listings of useful Sketch resources, learning sites, and video courses.
  
  Most of those resources are listed on Sketch App Sources.

• Leading Facebook community

  Since 2014, Sketch has been running a Facebook group. The group is well-moderated with many discussions around Sketch features, plugins made by the community and general design questions. The Sketch team managed to create a good place for users to chat with each other.

• Sketch ambassadors organize events, host workshops, run training sessions, and actively support Sketch online. The Sketch team supports their work daily by having a dedicated Community Manager, Patrick Hill, run the Sketch Ambassador Program. The Ambassadors have hosted over 100 events since the beginning of 2019.

• Who doesn’t like swag?

• Listing community activities on site

  Figma mentions most of their community-related activities in their “Community and Events” and “Resources Hub” sections.

• Hiring a community manager

  Figma’s community manager takes care of community building activities, meetups and all communication with users. Josh Dunsterville was the first to take this role in February 2018. The creation of this job is a clear sign of how serious Figma are about connecting with its community.

• In September 2018, Figma additionally hired three Designer Advocates across different time zones and geographies. Among them are Tom Lowry from Canada, Namnso Ukpanah from Nigeria, and Zach Grosser from Amsterdam (ex). Their main role is to support Local Communities.

• When Figma introduced local meetups, they started looking for brand ambassadors in different regions. Having direct touch with Figma enthusiasts allows them to keep global community efforts in sync.

• Who doesn’t like swag?