Age Suitability

Who Designed is for

Designed’s current membership platform is for adults aged 18 and over. It provides design education, professional development, peer feedback, and mentorship.

Our long-term mission includes K–12 design education. That program is not yet available. Any future offering for school-age learners will have its own age-appropriate experience, participation requirements, and safeguards.

The minimum age of 18 is a condition of our Terms of Service, and our Privacy Policy says the same: the platform is not directed to anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18.

What is on the platform

Designed is a professional community and a set of learning tools. The main things a member can do here are:

• Learn. Learning paths, skill labs, a career map and a growth plan, all produced or curated by Designed.
• Be mentored, or mentor. Members can request one-to-one and group mentoring sessions with other members who have volunteered as mentors, and exchange messages with them to arrange and follow up on those sessions.
• Share work for critique. Members upload their own design work and leave written feedback on each other’s.
• Read and post. Discussions, news links, podcasts, events, projects and job listings, most of which are submitted by members.

There is no advertising on Designed, no in-app purchases, no gambling or simulated gambling, and no loot boxes or other randomised rewards. Designed is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and takes donations, which are handled by a third-party payment processor.

Contact between members

This is the part most relevant to age suitability, so we want to be plain about it. Designed lets members communicate with each other. Mentoring runs through a message thread between a mentee and a mentor. Critique, discussions and comments are public to signed-in members. Member profiles carry a name, a photo and professional details that the member chooses to share.

Anything a member posts appears immediately. Member-submitted content is not reviewed by Designed before it is published. Some content types are queued for review before they are listed publicly, but written feedback and messages between members are not.

Content standards

Everyone who joins agrees to our Code of Conduct, and it is what every interaction here is measured against. It prohibits harassment, threats of violence, unwelcome sexual attention or remarks, intimidation, publishing someone’s personal information, intolerance and spam.

Designed carries no sexual content, no graphic violence, no horror, and no promotion of drugs, alcohol or tobacco. Because members write and upload the discussion and critique content themselves, we cannot guarantee that every post meets that standard at the moment it appears. We can and do remove content that does not, and we ban members who keep breaking the rules.

Designed is a global community, and discussion of professional design work can touch on serious subjects. Mild strong language is possible in member-written posts.

Reporting something

Every member can report content without leaving the page. Critiques, critique responses and job listings each carry a Report control. For anything else, go to our help center, where you can submit a request and choose “Report content”.

Reports go to our moderators. A moderator will confirm they have received your report, though a decision may take longer, because decisions are often made after discussion between moderators. Reports are kept anonymous to the wider community. The Code of Conduct sets out the full grievance process and the consequences, which run up to a permanent ban.

How we handle age

We want to be accurate rather than reassuring here. Everyone creating an account has to confirm they are 18 or over before they can finish joining, and the minimum age is a term of use. That confirmation is a declaration: we do not ask for a date of birth, and we do not run age verification or age estimation.

If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 18, we close the account and remove the personal information attached to it. If you believe someone under 18 has given us personal information, contact us at community@designed.org and we will remove it promptly.

Parents, guardians and educators

Designed is not currently open to anyone under 18, so the platform as it stands today is not somewhere to enrol a school-age learner. Our long-term mission includes K–12 design education, and when that program exists it will be a separate offering with its own age-appropriate experience, participation requirements, and safeguards. It is not available yet.

If you are assessing the adult platform, the two things worth knowing are that it allows direct contact between members, and that member-written content is published without prior review. Everything else on the platform is educational material about design.

Our Privacy Policy covers what we collect and the rights you have over it, including the right to ask us to delete an account and its data. A member can delete their own account from their settings at any time.

Community spaces off the platform

Designed does not currently run a chat community anywhere. An earlier Slack workspace is no longer active, and this page described it as current until 20 September 2026; it is gone rather than unlisted.

A Discord server is planned and is not open yet. When it opens it will be a separate service with its own terms and its own minimum age, and the conversations there will not be hosted by us. Our Code of Conduct will apply to members in it, and our moderators will be present, but the suitability information on this page describes designed.org rather than any third-party service.

Questions

If you are reviewing Designed for an app store, or you have a question this page does not answer, email community@designed.org and we will respond.