One of the founding principals of Armadillo Studios is to embrace, participate and encourage a sense of community.

If you’ve been following us for anytime you will have noticed how much we love to promote, retweet and encourage the growing Calgary tech community. It’s one of the main reasons, we started the “yycapps.com”:http://www.yycapps.com project last year and one of the main impetuses for participating with “democamps”:http://democampcalgary.com/, meet-ups and other “local ventures”:http://www.yycphotobook.com.

Leveraging the Virtual Community

There is a general misconception that the Web Design industry as a cut-throat dog-eat-dog world, in actuality it really is one of the most cooperative industries. With many developers and designers sharing their opinions and knowledge across corporate lines. Sure there are some moments when you’ll find yourself competing with another studios for a client, but on the whole, our experience has shown that it’s better to share and encourage than to ham up some fabricated rivalry.

It’s one of the main reasons, why we’ve started leveraging online design communities for peer-to-peer feedback.

For those unfamiliar with this notion, there are two really big design communities out there, “Forrst”:http://www.forrst.com and “Dribbble”:http://dribbble.com/. These sites are designed for web developers and designers to showcase their work and receive feedback from a vast community of their peers. With the ultimate goal of making the internet a more beautiful place.

In recent weeks, Armadillo Studios has taken to the “Forrst”:http://forrst.com/people/ctoverdrive community to leverage the vast wealth of knowledge from the online community on a variety of side projects – including the redesign of our “5 year anniversary stickers”:http://forrst.com/posts/Armadillo_Studios_2011-Dt5. That’s not to say we haven’t used our great local connections on numerous occasions to enhance our work, but rather we have chosen to couple those great relationships with a wider audience to get a more diverse set of opinions. All with the goal to better help enhance our designs and overal work.

(Of course, be rest assured that we don’t do this for every project just for some general non-client work. We always respect the privacy of our client base.)

Because of which, we’ve received some great feedback and taken a great step forward to improving our work. What we’ve found is that having a third party source to evaluate and comment on one’s work is really a nice benefit. Because some times it takes a third (or fourth or fifth) set of eyes to really kick up one’s own work.

So we’ll continue to showcase our work on these networks. If you happen to been on forrst, just give us a shout and we’ll add you to our friend list.

(_P.S. We would also like to send a shout out to aislingbrock for the invite to Forrst.com. Thank you very much._)