Designer News, once a daily destination for product designers, is dead. For many years, it was the best place on the internet to discuss designing and building software.
The community was recently sold to a job board called WeWorkRemotely. Since then, there has been a modal that states Designer News will no longer be supported. Today appears to be the day that it finally shuts down.
What made Designer News unique was its focus on text-based discussions. In the design world, almost all online communities are dominated by aesthetics—think Dribbble or Behance. Designer News offered a space to delve into the more nuanced aspects of product design—discussions on functionality, implementation, accessibility, and team building. These types of discussions were completely absent in the more visually-oriented forums.
I was an early member of Designer News—number 484. For several years, I was a top contributor and was even invited to host the community podcast, DN FM. The first few years, from 2013 to 2016, were filled with quality discussions with incredibly knowledgeable people. I’m grateful to those early members who taught me a ton.
Looking back, the early years were so good. DN’s invite-only policy kept discussion and post quality high. The site was available for everyone to see, but an invitation from another member was required to contribute. This made moderation easy.
At some point—I think around 2016—the site was set to open registration, allowing anyone to join and contribute. That’s fine, but an open community requires additional features to assist with moderation and moderators to do it. At that point, Designer News had neither. The following year, post quality started to decline, and by 2018, the site was mostly filled with spam.
Community moderator Catalin Cimpanu summed up the general sentiment in a 2020 discussion about Designer News.
While this was a gated community, this place was just awesome. Now… listicles, how-to’s, ugly Dribbble shots, “trends” posts, endless UX hot takes, and run-of-the-mill “show site” submissions are the norm.
Designer News was created by a company called Layervault, which had built a version control system for design files—essentially, Git for designers. At a time when design and engineering were coming closer together, the product made a lot of sense.
They were the ones that coined the term “flat design” with their post The Flat Design Era. The team viewed the move away from skeumorphism as a more honest approach to design. I had the privilege to interview LayerVault’s co-founder and CEO, Kelly Sutton, back in 2014. Unfortunately, the business couldn’t establish a solid foundation and ceased operations in 2015.
Metalab (or maybe Tiny?) acquired Designer News that year. For a while, they were good stewards of the community, investing resources and organizing events for community members.
At one of those events in Atlanta, I had the opportunity to spend time with Max, one of the community organizers. Max was familiar with my interviews and asked if I’d be interested in hosting the Designer News podcast—what would become DN FM. Unlike with Signal Tower, I had a producer and someone scheduling guests. I just had to show up and have a chat—well, that and put in hours of research. But it was a pretty good gig while it lasted.
Anyways, I’m not sure if anyone cares. I haven’t seen other posts about it. There’s no goodbye page. It’s kind of sad—so I felt compelled to write something.
The truth is Designer News is dead and has been dead for a long time. First, contributors like myself contributed less and less, then the regulars started visiting less frequently. Slowly, and then all of a sudden, the community turned into a ghost town.
If you’re a product designer or were a regular on Designer News, where do you have product discussions online? I’d love to find a replacement.
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