Ever wondered which country has the best designers? Well I did, and I decided to find out with the help of Dribbble’s designers directory.
DISCLAIMER: please don’t take this too seriously (especially if your country lost!). I realize very well that there’s no such thing as “the best designers”, and even if there was Dribbble stats would probably not be the only way to judge the matter.
Total number of Dribbblers
The most basic metric would be the total number of Dribbble members per country, and that’s the metric Dribbble uses by default to rank countries. No surprises here, the rankings are what you’d expect:
- United States — 7321
- United Kingdom — 1691
- Canada — 830
- Germany — 375
- Australia — 372
- Russia — 322
- France — 319
- Netherlands — 313
- Sweden — 245
- Spain — 216
- Belgium — 216
For me, the takeaway here is how small the Dribbble community still is. 319 designers in France, that’s about the same amount as the student body of a single design school!
That can only mean that Dribbble has tremendous room to grow, and that there are countless high-caliber designers that are not on the site yet.
Total numbers of followers
But high quantity doesn’t mean high quality. Instead of just looking at the number of Dribbblers, what if we look at the number of followers possessed by each one of those Dribbblers? To make things simpler, I decided to only add the followers of the top 10 Dribbblers for each country. Here are the results:
- United States — 87055
- United Kingdom — 35476
- Netherlands — 29753
- Canada — 27840
- Russia — 20392
- Belgium — 20012
- Germany — 17774
- Australia — 16701
- Sweden — 13719
- France — 12859
- Spain — 8730
The US and UK are still in the top of the rankings, but we can see the Netherlands and Belgium starting to creep up thanks to a couple amazing designers.
Followers/Dribbblers Ratio
But where things get really interesting is when you calculate the ratio between the number of Dribbblers in a country and the number of Followers possessed by those Dribbblers:
- Netherlands — 95
- Belgium — 92
- Russia — 63
- Sweden — 55
- Germany — 47
- Australia — 44
- Spain — 40
- France — 40
- Canada — 33
- United Kingdom — 20
- United States — 11
What do you know! The rankings are almost completely flipped! Although the US and UK have lots of talented Dribbblers with many followers, it turns out that they have even more less-followed members, which drags them down in the rankings.
On the other hand, the Netherlands and Belgium are design powerhouses who produces a lot of great designers despite the small size of their communities.
Followers/Total Population Ratio
I thought it might also be interesting to factor in a country’s population. So I checked the rankings for the ratio between a country’s total number of followers (for the top 10 Dribbblers) and a country’s total population (in millions):
- Belgium — 2001
- Netherlands — 1860
- Sweden — 1524
- Canada — 819
- Australia — 759
- United Kingdom — 572
- United States — 284
- Germany — 219
- France — 201
- Spain — 190
- Russia — 145
Belgium and the Netherlands confirm their lead, showing that when it comes to design, (population) size doesn’t matter. On the other hand Russia is disadvantaged by its huge population, and even their best icon designers can’t do enough to avoid being last.
Conclusions
I think the big takeaway here is that when it comes to design, Belgium and the Netherlands simply kick ass, showing that they’re about more than just waffles.
Also, the Russian government must put something in the water supply that mutates people into genius icon designers.
The US and UK don’t look so dominant after all when you factor in the size of their communities.
And despite my best efforts, France ranks pretty badly no matter how you slice it…
