Creative work can often seem a solitary pursuit. All of the long hours sketching, coding, writing, or designing at your desk. It’s easy to forget that the creative community is what keeps us inspired, challenged, and connected. Whether it’s AIGA, CreativeMornings, a local meetup, or a casual Discord group, creative communities are where ideas cross-pollinate and energy builds. And right now, when so much feels fragmented, leaning on community is essential.

Why community matters more than ever

When we talk about community, people often picture networking events or digital engagement. But lately, we’ve been interested in pursuing creative communities in real life because fostering those types of relationships can feel so much richer. Engaging with your local sphere can be the gateway to a new job, a new skill, or just a cool new friend.

Dropmark as a community companion

Dropmark is inherently private. It’s built to give you space to explore ideas, collect references, and organize your creative world free from the time suck of social media or the bummer of ads. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be used to document how you engage with the world around you.

We’ve made a list of a few ways to use Dropmark as a quiet companion to your community life:

• Event Boards: Save flyers, speaker decks, quotes, or even snapshots from a community event like a CreativeMornings talk that stuck with you.
• Connection Boards: Collect links to people you meet. Save their portfolios, socials, or projects worth revisiting later.
• Theme Boards: Track recurring ideas across talks, workshops, or exhibitions. Over time, you’ll see patterns in what excites and inspires you.

Think of it as a personal scrapbook or memo pad of your creative world.

Positive side effects you may encounter

Capturing community experiences can have a surprising ripple effect on your life! It not only reminds you that you’re a part of something bigger than your own projects but also gives you another resource to tap into when you’re feeling stuck or uninspired.

By using Dropmark to document these experiences, the community becomes less abstract and more tangible. It shifts from something you attend to something you actively build into your creative practice.

Your portfolio shows what you make.
Your community boards show what makes you, you.
Now is the time to nurture both. Start a Dropmark collection for your creative community, and let it remind you that you’re not creating in isolation. You’re part of a larger, living conversation.

At Dropmark, your tools should keep up with your ideas. Whether you’re organizing visual inspiration, managing research, or collaborating with your team, keyboard shortcuts help you stay in flow and move faster without lifting your hand off the keyboard. While our interface is intentionally minimal, shortcuts can help you move faster and stay in your creative flow.

Below, we’ve rounded up every keyboard shortcut currently available in Dropmark. Some are available to everyone, and others unlock with a Solo or Team plan. Whether you’re new to shortcuts or looking to level up your workflow, there’s something here for you.

F — Toggle sidebar & focus search
Opens or collapses the sidebar and immediately focuses the search field. One tap, zero clicks.

← / → — Navigate between items
Use the arrow keys to flip through items in a collection—ideal for reviewing visuals, inspiration, or saved links.

Quick download: ‘option’ + click (‘alt’ + click on Windows)
Thumbnail to automatically download the original item (Chrome or Safari only).

Quick view
‘command’ + ‘shift’ + click (‘ctrl’ + ‘shift’ + click on Windows) thumbnail to quickly open the original item in a new tab.

Esc — Exit item view
Hit Escape to return to collection view.
M — Toggle Menu (Fullscreen Mode Only)
In fullscreen mode, press M to show or hide the navigation menu.

⌘ + S / Ctrl + S — Save text item quickly
Working with notes or text-based items? Use this shortcut to save without ever reaching for your mouse. It’s a small time-saver that adds up, especially during brainstorming or documentation-heavy workflows.

1 / 2 / 3 / 4 — Switch collection views instantly (solo plan and above)
Cycle between Tile, Shelf, Flow, and List views by simply tapping the number keys. It’s the fastest way to reframe your collection and spot patterns in your content.

Thinking of upgrading?
If you’re curious about the extra tools in Solo or Team plans, keyboard shortcuts are just the beginning. You’ll also unlock so many more features that’ll make it easy to collaborate with your team or clients.

Explore plans and pricing →

Already a shortcut superuser? Tag us @dropmark with your favorites—or the feature you can’t live without.

Have you ever seen a brand and thought, ‘I wish I could create something like that’? Us too! That’s why we’re peeling back the layers of our favorite brands to uncover what makes them stand out and using Dropmark to turn them into creative inspiration fuel.

Few brands treat paper like a playground the way GF Smith does. Their website isn’t just a catalog of stock, it’s an experience that celebrates color, texture, and movement in a way that feels both meticulously refined and emotionally expressive. Using Dropmark, we reverse-engineered the design language behind the new GF Smith digital presence to understand how it all comes together, built by Templo.

Here’s how it all comes together:

The Logo
The GF Smith logo is a blocky, almost calligrammatic stack of letters that reads like a name and stands like a stamp. Designed from their custom typeface, GF Smith Homie, the logo transforms a traditional wordmark into a compact emblem that serves as both a logo and a personified identity. It reflects GF Smith’s belief that typography itself is a visual material.

Typography
The primary typeface used throughout the site resembles a modern grotesque with warm details, striking a balance between utility and character. While the logo leans hard into sculptural form, the body and UI text offer a clear, modular rhythm that makes browsing seamless.

UI Decisions
Animated text-based buttons that gently animate on hover.
Mouse hover effects on paper textures that subtly react with lighting—a mix of light and dark shadow movements that mimic how real paper shifts in light.
Scroll-triggered transitions, especially on their color card pages, where cards slide into view from the side as you scroll.
Sticky navigation bars that maintain minimal presence while keeping key links accessible.

Motion + Texture
This is where the brand really sings. The site is filled with quiet, precise motion:
Paper swatches that hover and tilt like they’re being lifted from a desk.
Gradual fades and slides instead of quick transitions, keeping the rhythm meditative.
Shadow animations that add dimensionality to otherwise flat UI components.

Color
Naturally, color takes center stage. GF Smith offers hundreds of papers, but their site doesn’t overwhelm. Instead, each scroll or swipe introduces a new hue with confidence and clarity. Cards slide in with deliberate timing, and color becomes a storytelling tool rather than a background element.

Final Thoughts
GF Smith’s digital identity extends its paper philosophy into the browser. It honors materiality through code, layering typographic integrity with intentional movement. For designers and developers, it’s a masterclass in translating brand essence into interactive environments.

Build your breakdown
We used Dropmark to collect references and dissect how each design choice supports GF Smith and the playful nature of paper. You can view our full mood board here.

Want to try it yourself? Find a brand you admire, start a collection, and break down what’s working—from type choices to layout systems. Reverse engineering is a great way to sharpen your eye, and Dropmark makes it simple to stay organized while you do it.

By breaking down brands into their key elements, we can return to these inspirational collections for future projects (It also doubles as a creative exercise if you feel stuck). This spin on inspiration hunting takes the pressure off a blank page. It allows you to explore what makes designs resonate with you, rather than forcing gold from your pen when the ink feels dry.

We hope you enjoyed this edition of Reverse Engineered. If this type of project inspires you, we hope you make your own! Take a look at our collection to explore further, or get started on your own! Let us know if you’ve got a suggestion for who we should reverse engineer next!

Most creatives treat their portfolios like a display case: polished, tidy, and frozen in time. Projects are presented in their final form: cropped, captioned, and sealed up for good.

But here’s a question…what if your creative work didn’t end when the case study was written? What if your portfolio weren’t just a record but a living document of what you’re still thinking about?

The problem with “final” work
Traditional portfolios are designed to showcase success. But the truth is, the creative process is rarely clean. Projects get paused. Pitches get ghosted. That branding concept you loved? The client chose the other one.

When we only celebrate what’s complete, we quietly devalue everything else:
The experiments.
The dead ends.
The early sketches that led nowhere but changed everything.

These pieces are rarely seen, but they’re often where the real growth happens.

Reframing the role of your portfolio
Instead of seeing your portfolio as a graveyard, what if you saw it as a garden? Something alive and in progress. Dropmark makes this shift easy. Create collections for the unfinished, the experimental, the too-weird-for-client-work and actually return to them.

These “living” collections become:

• Idea compost: a place for half-started thoughts that might sprout later
• Process logs: sketches, screenshots, in-between states, and voice memos
• Creative loops: a space to revisit and remix past ideas into future work

You don’t need to publish these boards publicly. But you should have them not just as a creative backlog, but as a way to stay connected to your own practice.

Why this matters
Creative work doesn’t always move in a straight line. Keeping your in-progress ideas close helps fight perfectionism and honors the messier, more truthful version of how we actually make things.

A client might never see your abandoned concept for a community-run coffee brand. But a year from now, you might revisit that board and realize: Oh. It’s not dead. It was just early.

Start your WIP collection today
Give yourself a place to drop unfinished things. The rough, the raw, the “maybe someday.” Treat it with the same care you’d give your final case studies because sometimes, the process is the point.

At the start of the year, we wrote about setting SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound). We also shared how you could use Dropmark to visualize and organize them: creating collections for each goal, images and links for inspiration, and timelines for accountability.

Six months later, it’s time for us to have a check-in. What has worked? What hasn’t? And how did a visual approach to goal-setting actually hold up?

Spoiler: Some of those boards are thriving. Others…well, they are more like digital time capsules.

Where we stayed on track

Let’s start with the wins, because even small ones count.

Publish at least 2 blog posts per month

We set up a collection just for writing ideas, inspiration, and drafts. Having everything in one place — from content frameworks to screenshots of great posts — made it easier to get started each time. Seeing the board slowly fill up became its own form of motivation.

Curate a library of creative references

Another goal we had was to stop relying on scattered screenshots and saved links that we could never find again. So we built a few boards organized by type: typography, product design, color palettes, UI moments, and even copywriting that resonated with us. Over time, it’s become a living resource to refer back to.

Dropmark made it feel less like hoarding and more like building a creative toolkit; searchable, visual, and way more satisfying than digging through a messy desktop.

These goals worked because they were tied to habits we already enjoyed and because the visuals reminded us why we set them in the first place.

Where things were not so SMART

Learn motion design (1hr/week)

This one seemed great on paper. A collection full of tutorials, cool animations, and courses bookmarked. We underestimated how much mental energy learning a new skill really takes. The board was barely touched after March. 😅

“Improve work/life balance”

This one wasn’t specific or measurable, and it showed in a big way. We had cozy cabin photos, affirmations, and tips like “log off at 6 pm,” but without an actual plan, it stayed aspirational rather than actionable.

What we will try moving forward

Instead of giving up on the goals that drifted, we are rebuilding them with better scaffolding:

More clarity in board titles.

Instead of “Wellness goals,” it’s “Log off by 6 pm (M-F)”

Instead of “Creative habits,” it’s “Make one personal project this month”

Monthly reflection snapshots.

At the end of each month, drop in a screenshot and a note to capture how things felt. Checking in this way makes progress feel more tangible, even if it’s not linear.

Less pressure, more play.

Trying not to treat goals like tasks to complete, but like ongoing areas of curiosity. If a board doesn’t light us up anymore, we should archive it, guilt-free.

The wrapup

So, did it work? Honestly? Kind of. The framework helped us start strong. But the real magic came from checking in, being flexible, and giving ourselves the freedom to adapt as time goes on.

Dropmark helped us see that evolution. Some boards stayed polished and practical. Others turned into beautiful messes. All of them taught us something.

Have you ever seen a brand and thought, ‘I wish I could create something like that’? Us too! That’s why we’re peeling back the layers of our favorite brands to uncover what makes them stand out and using Dropmark to turn them into creative inspiration fuel.

The RSPCA launched a rebrand in 2024, marking a significant shift in tone from clinical and institutional to warm, clear, and emotionally intelligent. Designed by Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR), the new identity keeps the organization’s legacy while making it more approachable for the next generation of animal lovers.

With Dropmark, we reverse-engineered the brand to a moodboard to understand what’s at work here: how typography, color, UI, and symbolism work together to create a system that’s gentle but purposeful.

Here’s how it all comes together:

Color palette
The new palette is vibrant but grounded. A deep navy remains true to the original identity, signifying trust in the brand. It’s now paired with brighter, more energetic shades of blue and pops of coral and cream, bringing a human touch to a space often dominated by institutional coldness. The balance creates a tone of reassurance and compassion, not clinical distance.

Typography
We’re always fans of custom type, and for this project, JKR introduced a custom sans-serif typeface with soft terminals, generous spacing, and rounded corners. The result is compassionate, accessible, and contemporary. It works great across print and digital touchpoints. Strong yet clear and kind, it feels like a key shift for a brand rooted in care.

Symbol
One of the most recognizable updates is the new logo shape. It retains the familiarity of the old logo but strips away the noise—now soft, geometric, and adaptable. It functions as a standalone mark or inline with text, appearing across signage, social media icons, and mobile UI. Flexible across digital, print, and signage, it reinforces brand recall while adding visual charm.

UI decisions
The live RSPCA website embodies the brand’s values through practical and purposeful UI. In contrast to the warmth generated by the typeface and color palette, there are no rounded buttons or exaggerated flourishes here—just solid, accessible interface decisions.

• Square or slightly radiused buttons

• High-contrast color pairings for readability

• Simple top navigation and CTA hierarchy

• Large, legible text and clean layouts

• Mobile-friendly without feeling templated

Photography
Photography across the brand avoids stock clichés. Instead, it focuses on candid, in-between moments, animals in safe spaces, and people connecting through care. Line illustrations add playfulness without becoming overwhelming, supporting content rather than distracting from it.

Build your breakdown
We used Dropmark to collect references and dissect how each design choice supports the RSPCA’s mission. You can see our full moodboard here.

Want to try it yourself? Find a brand you admire, start a collection, and break down what’s working—from type choices to layout systems. Reverse engineering is a great way to sharpen your eye, and Dropmark makes it simple to stay organized while you do it.

By breaking down brands into their key elements, we can return to these inspirational collections for future projects (It also doubles as a creative exercise if you feel stuck). This spin on inspiration hunting takes the pressure off of a blank page. It allows you to explore what makes designs resonate with you instead of forcing gold from your pen when the ink feels dry.

We hope you enjoyed this edition of Reverse Engineered. If this type of project inspires you, we hope you make your own! Go take a look at our collection to explore further, or get started on your own! Let us know if you’ve got a suggestion for who we should reverse engineer next!