The new homepage to spotify.design
If you follow this blog or the trend of major companies using .design domain names, you know the strategic answer why: Major brands, especially tech companies, are using .design to create content marketing destinations that highlight their internal projects, goals, and culture in an effort to further bolster recruiting within the competitive fields of UX, web, and graphic design.
The newest site to crop up on our radar, spotify.design, is no different. They have a clear "Join Us!”call to action.
What’s so exciting about spotify.design is that it emerged with such a rich library of diverse content, after the domain merely redirected to the Spotify Design’s Twitter account for possibly a year or longer. The fact that the Spotify Design team was using Twitter for so long is an interesting point. Many people and projects defer on ever getting a website and are able to make a business or create community through social media. However, we know that the ability to add and curate a website means that spotify.design is a more strategic and shared endeavor. It allows for more contributors, more disparate content such as the “Events” tab, as well as the subscription to their newsletter and the invitation to apply for their open positions.
I also note that their “Join Us” tab refers to an entirely separate site, spotifyjobs.com, with a filter applied to show design-centric jobs. This is also interesting because it implies to me that the jobs site alone is not enough content and context for the design team. They want to show off what they do, who they are, and recruit like-minded teammates. The jobs site may suffice for other departments and the company as a whole, but clearly the Spotify Design team is a dynamic and collaborative bunch that deserves to be seen as a unique group within Spotify.
We're super thrilled at each new major brand that recognizes the strategic value in starting a site on .design to target designers. Of course the over two dozen name brands using .design in this way are not the typical use case. The average .design user is a freelancer or small design team. It is often a newer company in the graphic, web, or UX design space, and it is thanks to their enthusiastic adoption of .design that the brands have realized it is a place they also need to be.