SND partners with .design for member benefit

We are excited to have partnered with an innovative service provider to help SND members stand out in an increasingly digital world. The new .design domain name is going to be provided free for the first year via our own snd.design site.

The basic premise for our individual members is simple, after all, do you .com or do you .design? By using .design you are often able to get shorter, better names and domains that would have otherwise been unavailable in .com. Furthermore, it adds context to your branding in an explicit and elegant way, which extends from your website’s URL to the email address you create for it as well.

At snd.design, members will be able to log in with their member IDs to get access to choose their domain name. The offer also includes a year of email hosting to create fun and memorable addresses like [email protected] The site is powered by domain registrar, Porkbun.com, which always includes free WHOIS security as well as SSL certs. Anyone who has ever been upsold on these services elsewhere knows this is a good deal!

More importantly than the great deal, we’re excited to prepare our members and community for this powerful new shift in Internet navigation and online branding. The importance of this development is underscored by the many major companies that have not only secured their brand names in .design but are putting up content rich sites. Within the news and content space, NPR.design, Facebook.design, and Medium.design are all notable. Then sites like Airbnb.design, Booking.design, Kohler.design and T-Mobile’s Telekom.design show further variety in the corporate landscape. These big players use their .design sites to house new content streams and highlight unique facets of their brand that would be otherwise impossible on their main .com sites. They almost universally talk about what it is their design team does, how they work, and are aimed at bolstering recruiting in the competitive design employment market.

“There is nothing better than being able to welcome a whole new industry of design to the growing .design community. The Society for News Design is a particularly engaged and ever relevant group of designers and big picture thinkers,” said .design’s Director of Business Development, Andrew Merriam. “The wide design community, across disciplines, is often focused on making the world a better, more intelligible and welcoming place. The big picture mindset that designers and SND members use in their work means that .design will become synonymous with both leadership and creativity and so we are very excited to continue to support SND and its members.”

It was the innovative potential for its individual members that prompted SND to partner with .design.

“We are excited that members will be able to join an active community and also brand themselves in the digital design space,” said Matt Mansfield, SND’s Outreach Director, who worked on the collaboration. “SND members are always at the forefront of innovation and leadership. This partnership is another terrific example.”