Designer News

» see designernews.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Designer News existed because of a specific complaint about Hacker News. Allan Grinshtein and Kelly Sutton, who were running LayerVault, felt that designers posting there got drowned out by engineers, so at the end of 2012 they built the same machine with a different audience: upvoted links with threaded comments underneath, on a front page that reordered itself all day. It opened as a side project to a startup that was selling version control for design files.

It worked immediately and it worked for the reason these things work, which is that the first few hundred members set the tone and everyone after them copies it. Membership was sequential and people knew their number. At its best it was pulling around two hundred thousand designers a month, and for a stretch in the mid-2010s it was the default place a designer went to find out what the rest of the field was arguing about that week.

The parent company did not survive it. LayerVault ran out of money and announced on 11 April 2015 that it was closing, having failed to make the version control business sustainable or raise again. Designer News was the asset that had value, so it was sold rather than shut, and the community outlived the company that built it by nine years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ two owners and a job board ~

Andrew Wilkinson bought it, through MetaLab and then the Tiny group of companies, and wrote a post about Designer News 2.0 and what it could become. What it actually became was an acquisition sitting inside a holding company with dozens of other properties. Later it was moved again, over to We Work Remotely, a remote job board in the same family.

Open registration arrived around 2016. That is the hinge. A sequential invite-shaped community with a known founding cohort turns into an open signup form, and from there it needed more moderators, paid ones, with better tools than the original side project had shipped. None of that was funded. By 2018 the front page was substantially spam, and the people who had made the place worth reading had stopped posting. One of the Hacker News comments about its death put it plainly: it died much longer ago in actuality.

~ the last captures ~

There was no announcement, so the date has to come out of the archive. The Internet Archive has a complete working Designer News on 24 January 2024, front page at 27 kilobytes, and crawls of the about page and the badges page on 28 January. Archive Team ran a grab of the comment permalinks on 22 and 23 January, which is usually a sign that somebody with better information than the public had already heard it was going.

On 1 February 2024 an early member, number 484, posted that today appeared to be the day it finally shut down. By the 2 February capture, designernews.co answered with a 302 to weworkremotely.com, carrying a tracking parameter that credited the traffic to designernews.co. Eleven years of a community redirected into a referral link for the job board that owned it.

~ what happened to the address ~

The redirect ran through most of 2024 and into 2025. By March 2025 the domain was answering with small pages again, a couple of kilobytes each, and by November 2025 the capture is a 31 kilobyte search-engine-bait page titled "Best Sites Like Bovada USA", with the Designer News name still sitting in the leftover structured data underneath it.

Designer News was built by designers who were annoyed about a ranking algorithm, and it ends as filler text under its own stolen schema markup. There is no third owner coming to fix that.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »