Kohler is an incredibly well-known and regarded brand, mostly for its bathroom and plumbing products. However, for some time now you may have seen Kohler branding itself under ambitions terms and creating aesthetically and technologically ambitious products; “The Bold Look of Kohler” tagline is probably familiar.

Kohler is an incredible success story, co-founded in Wisconsin in 1873  by Austrian immigrant John Michael Kohler. Anyone would recognize their wordmark on a sink, tub or toilet but they have shown great skill at defining higher end fixtures and artful home necessities as well. For example, in the early 2000s Kohler and its distribution partners began opening branded stores and they were so successful that they were able to spin off a higher end store, The KOHLER Signature Store, by 2012. Both the classic, entry-level brand and the more designful and cutting edge brand continue to expand simultaneously.

Recently, I was lucky enough to travel to the Society of News Design conference in Charlotte, N.C.

It was a fantastic experience for me; yes, I subscribe to a physical paper and I read the news so much that it’s probably negatively affecting my health and sanity. Journalism and news delivery are incredibly important professions, which has unfortunately become an interesting political flashpoint as of late. So it was humbling and exciting to listen to representatives of the New York Times talk about their digital evolution and the Washington Post talk about life after Bezos as well as NPR’s Deputy Creative Director, Daniel Newman, talk about Designing for Audio.

As an avid listener to NPR it was interesting to hear about their approach and their focus on the audio of the stories. When I’m at work and allowing myself to be distracted, I often read and glance through NPR pieces on their site rather than listen, I scroll past the big ‘play’ button without considering that this story was first intended to be listened to.

I’ve previously pointed to major corporate use cases of .design, like facebook.design and airbnb.design. One of the things that is so interesting about these sites is that they are content rich and full of a variety of resources, from videos to interviews to design manifestos to event promotion and individual contributions from team members.

Now, we’re seeing an ingenious corporate use case that creates just as interesting a destination with far less work on the actual website itself. The goal is largely the same, to focus and raise the voice of a company’s design team and bolster their recruiting, but the medium (ha!) is different.

The benefits of new top-level domains (nTLDs) for companies and individuals that were never able to get a great .com are obvious. Now, they can have unique, short and brandable domain names and, with options like .design, they can add context in a way that .com never could.

Recently, there have been some really exciting developments for .design in particular. While it has already differentiated itself as one of the most successful new TLDs, it now seems to be one of the only extensions that is receiving significant traction with the world’s largest and hottest companies, which are creating sites like facebook.design, airbnb.design, medium.design, and telekom.design (from T-Mobile’s parent company, Deutsche Telekom).