Platform Updates
A running record of what shipped on Designed.org — new features, improvements, bug fixes, and announcements, published as they go out.
v2026.08.14
Introducing Prism — and this page
We're rebuilding Designed.org's design system from the ground up, one page at a time — and Platform Updates is where we'll be posting about it, and everything else, from here on.
Platform Updates now checks the database less often
Tuned this page to refresh its data every 3 hours instead of every 10 minutes — the changelog rarely changes that often.
v2026.08.13
Career Map: see the path, see the gap
Explore real design career paths, see which skills you're missing for the role you want, and get a plan to close the gap.
Critique: structured feedback on your work
Submit your work and get structured, specific peer feedback — not just "looks good!" comments.
Help Center launched
A real, searchable help center — answers to the questions we hear most, in one place instead of scattered across emails.
v2026.08.12
Fixed pages occasionally showing outdated content
A caching issue could leave News and Podcasts pages briefly showing an older version right after something new was published.
Designed Events launched
Find design events near you or online — meetups, conferences, talks — mark yourself Interested or Going, and add them straight to your calendar.
Cleaned up dependencies, resolved 35 security alerts
Removed unused and outdated packages from the codebase, clearing 35 flagged security advisories.
v2026.08.11
Designed News launched
A curated and community-submitted design news feed, with voting, comments, and mentor picks.
Fixed a bug that could send your message to the wrong mentor
"Contact a Mentor" could, in rare cases, address a message to a different mentor than the one you actually messaged.
Mentor directory scrolling no longer traps you
Endless auto-loading on Our Mentors made the footer, and the rest of the site, unreachable by scrolling.
v2026.08.07
Fixed the sign-in flash on page load
If you were logged in, the menu would briefly flash "Login" before correcting itself — that's fixed for good.
Hardened sign-in checks on content submissions
Job, podcast, and community submissions, and image uploads, now check that you're actually signed in on the server, not just in the page itself.
Fixed toggle switches in Settings always showing "on"
Availability and social-link toggles on your Settings page displayed as on regardless of their actual saved state.
v2026.08.06
Redesigned About, Donate, Contact, Our Donors, and Get Involved
Five pages got a consistent, modern, mobile-first redesign — same visual language, same spacing, same width, finally.
The whole site now works on your phone
Added a real mobile menu and fixed dozens of small layout bugs — the site was genuinely unusable on a phone below a certain width until now.
Fixed pages sometimes loading with no styling after a deploy
A caching issue could briefly show some visitors an old, completely unstyled version of the site right after we shipped an update.
Fixed a few accessibility issues
Corrected invalid list markup on the podcasts page and added a missing accessible name to a share icon.
v2026.08.05
Moved mentor-contact email to a more reliable delivery service
Rebuilt how "Contact a Mentor" emails get sent, moving off an unauthenticated third-party endpoint onto a dedicated service.
Jobs and podcasts now update without a code deploy
Moved job listings and the podcast library onto a real database, and added 97 more design podcasts from Goodpods' Top 100 leaderboard.
Fixed pagination breaking, and taking forever to click through
Some page counts made the "next page" button disappear entirely; reaching the last page of Mentors or Jobs could take literally hundreds of clicks.
Fixed the mentor directory hiding about 100 real mentors
The default view of Our Mentors was quietly excluding anyone missing an optional field, like years of experience — now everyone shows up.