Last week I was lucky to catch some news over on Mashable (Link) mentioning a new design-centric social website called, appropriately enough, design:related (Link). I have to admit that the social networking arena is moving faster than I can track so I can’t really comment on the service in the context of what other services in general might offer, but it does seem as if it might be trying to offer some competition to stalwart design website Core77. Like Core, design:related is offering portfolio hosting, a job board, and design networking, but also infers that it’s trying to build something more cohesive, inspirational and perhaps a bit viral in nature. I’m not sure that’ll be enough as Core is extremely well-known and enjoys a mutually-beneficial partnership with BusinessWeek which further raises the site’s profile.
That said, I’m finding Core to be showing signs of age even after it’s recent upgrade. The Core blog is getting increasingly lame in my opinion, and the forum never built the kind of community one finds over at Product Design Forums – a consequence of putting short-term site traffic ahead of long-term growth and useability. Furthermore, the relationship with BusinessWeek isn’t always a good thing, in my opinion.
Either way, I figure some competition is good. I’ve just signed up for an account on design:related and, having gotten my home network sorted out earlier today, have also begun updating my Core portfolio. Perhaps I’ll be able to provide a comparison of the two sites in the future after design:related has gotten on its feet, but as that might not happen, I’d recommend people just sign up and judge for themselves.
I just made an account on design:related as well after reading about it on Josh Spear’s blog. The community gave me a warm welcome, although I’m one of the only industrial designers there. The “inspiration” rating system is the most promising feature as far as I can tell. Hope to see you there!
I’ve not checked to see how many ID people are on it (I should check). And more than anything it’s the Inspiration feature that has me curious. It’ll be interesting to see how that’s adopted and incorporated by users.
I also think we’ll see additional features added. I could be mistaken but the individual pages didn’t seem modifiable. One would think that providing that sort of flexibility – at least in some capacity – would be a no-brainer considering the target market.
Cripe. I think we’re the only two product design people on that site. I just went through all the portfolio images and only saw you and me.