ICP approved in Beijing

Earlier this month, we were informed that all our TLDs -.design, .wiki and .ink - are ICP approved in Beijing, which means all Internet users in Beijing can now build and operate their .design/.wiki/.ink websites, along with in other provinces in mainland China.

Internet Content Provider, or ICP, is a permit issued by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) to permit China-based websites to operate in China. It is a domain registry’s responsibility to obtain an ICP for its TLD(s). 

There was a lot of hard work went into the process, which makes the approval particularly exciting for our China team, in addition to all our TLDs being approved by MIIT earlier this year. In recent months, we have seen plenty of well-organized, Chinese culture influenced .design websites emerging from Chinese communities (i.e., loong.design, 9x9.design, du.design, ruolan.design, wechat.design, etc). With the ICP permit, we are confident to anticipate that the world will see more and more Chinese websites using our TLDs.

For more China-focused content, please follow our official WeChat account TopLevelDesignChina

Mozilla.design, creating brand consistency with .design

Don’t allow me to tell you why Mozilla’s design team launched mozilla.design, complete with downloadable brand assets and full guidelines, just see what they say right there on mozilla.design:

Screen Shot 2018-05-30 at 11.49.52 AM.png

Their reasons are clearly practical: by ensuring that the world has access to their logos, colors, type and accepted brand treatment, they are creating a consistent brand message even when the referential work is being created outside of Mozilla. They know their partners, applicants, and even designers may be tempted to Google image search for the most recent logo. We’ve all done it. We’ve all searched for someone else’s corporate logo to include in a slide deck or internal presentation. Mozilla, and the dozens of other companies using .design to share their design and brand assets, know that there is no point trying to lock down brand usage by withholding content. The only way to create a consistent brand is to make your assets available and ubiquitious.

This, of course, builds on their overall mission statement and company culture. They introduce mozilla.design by stating:

Mozilla is the champion for a healthy internet, one that is open and accessible for all, both technologically and culturally.

Working with such a lofty and general mission statement is only realized via the people and departments within that company. Thus, for a design department to be a part of a company and mission that is “open and accessible for all,” means that they would naturally build out a repository of all the brand assets anyone inside or outside of the company would need.

The mozilla.design site addresses Logo, Brand Application, Visual Elements, Color and Typography, and ties these design elements all back to the company’s history, its mission, and its growth.  It’s the type of big picture lens that defines design-led companies and ensures that a corporate mission isn’t just a phrase, but a way of doing work.

Amazon's new amazon.design site

Screen Shot 2018-03-20 at 2.40.44 PM.png

It is now no longer a trend but a standard practice to give a design department its own content destination, soapbox, and recruiting platform. Increasingly this is taking the form of a website on a .design domain. The introduction of the amazon.design site certainly marks a further maturation of the development we saw previously from the likes of facebook.design and airbnb.design.

What currently sets the new amazon.design site apart is its reliance on videos and first person accounts from their designers. At launch, the site featured five videos, each focusing on a given designer. The videos feature both design team leaders and team members, who all seem to work in the broad field of interaction or user-experience design with additional focuses such as motion design and sound design.

Each video also highlights how the Amazonian (yes, they call themselves that) was an interesting person before they arrived at Amazon and how they continue to focus on solo pursuits as well. The “work-life” balance is addressed head on. The designers in these videos spend as much time talking about what excites them in their personal life and pursuits as what inspires them at work. It’s clear that they are talking to potential peers and future colleagues, inviting fellow creatives to consider the benefits and challenges of working at Amazon.

I’ve personally seen Amazon exhibit at multiple, major design conferences. Unlike other vendors, they were not hawking products or wares but the company itself; their presence at these events has largely been a recruiting push. Of course a company of Amazon’s stature spends considerable time and resources finding the right candidates, hiring, and retaining them. It is a logical but important step to provide a destination for design recruits to learn more about the design department from their potential peers and teammates rather than just the HR or recruiting team.

The site links up to existing channels as well as personalized recruiting channels. The prominent Come Work With Us! tab redirects to an existing jobs portal. At the bottom of the page they reference a recent conference they attended as part of their design recruiting campaign, Did you catch us at IxDA and want to reach out? The link follows through to an email address set up specifically for messaging and recruiting around the IxDA conference, which is an Interaction Design conference that they were headlining sponsors of.

While Amazon is only slightly late to the .design party, it’s really encouraging to see them holistically linking the new amazon.design site to their recruiting strategy as a whole. There is too much time and money spent on design recruiting to not take the extra step of a dedicated platform like this .design site.

.design, .wiki Approved by MIIT of China

On January 23rd, Top Level Design’s .design and .wiki top-level domains (TLDs) received the official approval by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).

This follows on about the one year anniversary of MIIT’s approval of Top Level Design’s .ink. In the intervening year, .ink has found an interested and growing market, especially at registrars like Alibaba’s HiChina and Chengdu West. In China, .ink is often interpreted as “INternet King.”

The Chinese government requires all TLDs to be certified by MIIT. Once approved, Chinese residents can register domains in the TLD and host domains in mainland China. As of January 23rd, all of Top Level Design’s TLDs have been officially approved in mainland China.

The .design TLD has great potential in the Chinese market. The word design is internationally associated with smart and luxury products, which certainly have large and increasing cultural appeal in China. Good design, associated with companies like Apple, are sought after and China is experiencing rising interest in thoughtful and well-designed products, web services, apps, and more.

Furthermore, the .design premium model means domains like luxury.design and jewelry.design will soon be available on a first-come first-served basis via the registrar channel. This model has been hugely successful elsewhere, with over 20% of .design’s premium inventory registered in the first two years of operation. In fact, .design was on sale in China before current regulations required the approval process and during that time it was selling well, especially premium names, short domains, and potentially valuable names that were not designated as premium.

One of the most trafficked .design sites is ant.design, of Ant Financial, which is a part of the Alibaba Group and the most valuable fintech company in the world (formerly known as Alipay). The ant.design site is in both Mandarin and English and is a dynamic resource that lays out the design language used across Ant and Alibaba brands.

The .wiki TLD will be buoyed by the international association between wiki and authoritative information, such as that found on one of the world’s most trafficked site, Wikipedia.org. Current, popular .wiki sites in Asia and China include a Korean Wikipedia style project namu.wiki, and the Chinese byr.wiki search engine. In both cases we see the sites being used as knowledge resources. Wiki sites are generally associated with wiki software, allowing for collaborative editing, but it is not a requirement of .wiki. There is interesting potential for the .wiki TLD in the large, Chinese market that does not readily use Wikipedia but is aware of its influence.

Top Level Design’s CEO, Ray King, welcomed the news, “We have been working diligently since MIIT regulations were put in place to deliver our TLDs to the Chinese market. During this time we heard repeatedly from end users in China that our domains are wanted there. We’re excited to finally deliver, and our team in both China and the U.S. are ready to serve our current and new Chinese users. This is an especially auspicious way to prepare for the year of the dog!”

Availability for .design and .wiki is forthcoming at China’s major registrars and implementation is already underway at many; current registrar partners can be found here. New registrar partners, business interests, and domain buyers can reach out to Top Level Design’s Chinese Market Coordinator, Kimberly Sheng (in Chinese or English).