LayerVault Announces Sale of Designer News

over 8 years ago from Dan Marren, President @ OneBounce Advisors

LayerVault is pleased to announce today the sale of the Designer News web site to MetaLab founder Andrew Wilkinson.

The transition will take some time, but there should be no disruption to Designer News during the transition. The site will continue to be accessible at news.LayerVault.com.

The Designer News community grew tremendously from the original idea of founders Allan Grinshtein and Kelly Sutton and continues to be the foremost site for sharing design news and commentary in a thoughtful and respectful manner.

Thank you to all the members and users of Designer News.

60 comments

Chris Coleman, over 8 years ago
Dear Andrew Wilkinson,
Please make it so the login cookie doesn't expire every four minutes.
Thanks.
83 points
- ╯‵Д′)╯彡┻━┻ ., over 8 years ago
  If it was open source we could just file an issue on Github, but it is not. If you want to address issues like that, you can have a look at this: http://www.telescopeapp.org/
  I hope I don't sound arrogant here, I am merely pointing out that if the DN source code was open source it could be 10x better with user contributions and patches.
  8 points
- Andrew Wilkinson, over 8 years ago
  Ok seriously.
  14 points
Pablo Stanley, over 8 years ago
Dear Andrew,
Please do something about Search. Thank you.
P.
24 points
- Nic Trent, over 8 years ago
  I like the idea of an "upvote" archive. Similar to Twitter's favorite archive... just a listing of the posts users upvote to make it easier to find things.
  3 points
Rıza Selçuk Saydam, over 8 years ago
Here is the Andrew's blog post about it: https://medium.com/@awilkinson/designer-news-2-0-732f1064beb2
"Designer News is awesome as it is, so I don’t plan to make any radical changes."
24 points
- James Young, over 8 years ago
  I always thought DN was a pretty small community forum, surprised to read it requires thousands of dollars a month to run or does that include Layervault to?
  4 points
  - Joel Califa, over 8 years ago
    The amount of traffic this site gets is far from negligible.
    5 points
    - Bryant Chou, over 8 years ago
      I suppose for a Rails site (figured from the "X-Rack-.." HTTP response headers) $1-2k sounds about right. There are probably ways of speeding it up via Fastly however. Seems like they're also hosting on Rackspace, which isn't known for it's performance/price.
      4 points
      - Daniel Winter, over 8 years ago
        I can't quite imagine these numbers. My dedicated root (32gigs RAM, i3770K with 4*3.2ghz) costs 40€ a month and has unlimited traffic. Looking at the user IDs I would guess that DN has about 30k users, lets say only one fifth is registered, that would make about 150k regular visitors.
        Small Assumption.. everyone of these 150k interacts with the page 20 times a day, makes 3 Million Requests. Given that the day has 86k seconds and a (php) framework like lumen could take up to 3k requests per second a site should be able to handle quite a few million requests per day. So in the best case and with good coding this website should run on one of such roots, but lets add 5 of these hosts and we'd have 200€ a month for 5 beasty root servers. What's adding up cost here? Is the service included in these 1-2k per month or is rails so much more expensive or what's the reason behind it? I mean DN doesn't even host images, it's basically pure text, aside from the profile pics.
        1 point
  - Martin LeBlanc, over 8 years ago
    It's probably not optimized that much for performance then. Aggressive caching can make a huge difference. For a reference when Iconfinder had 1 M unique/month it cost about $2000 to run (server+CDN).
    4 points
    - Cristina Blaja, over 8 years ago
      I'd take 1mil unique/month for $2000 anytime
      0 points
Philip Lester, over 8 years ago (edited over 8 years ago )
Curious, how much did it sell for?
20 points
- Luis La Torre, over 8 years ago
  http://d2oadd98wnjs7n.cloudfront.net/file_attachments/42435/files/20130830043612-Dr._Evil_1_million_dollars.gif?1377862572
  1 point
Jim Silverman, over 8 years ago
wait. so metalab bought it? or just andrew wilkinson?
19 points
Catalin Cimpanu, over 8 years ago
Ahhh... so there's still life in this old bucket....
Gotta go back to filling it with news then! Off to work, don't wait up!
14 points
Ryan LeFevre, over 8 years ago
Glad to see DN go to a good home. I'll be working on facilitating the transition from a technical standpoint to minimize downtime as much as possible.
11 points
Matt Thomas, over 8 years ago
Congratulations! I’m coincidentally wearing my Design News t-shirt today.
11 points
- Pablo Robles, over 8 years ago (edited over 8 years ago )
  Good!
  2 points
  - Stefan Rauch, over 8 years ago
    On him.
    27 points
    - Pablo Robles, over 8 years ago
      LOL
      2 points
  - Stefan Rauch, over 8 years ago
    Edited? ;)
    0 points
    - Pablo Robles, over 8 years ago (edited over 8 years ago )
      Trolling ;)
      0 points
- Jaffar Khorshidi, over 8 years ago
  1!
  0 points
Paul @Stammy, over 8 years ago
Awesome! Glad it's not going to some non-designer :)
5 points
- Joel Califa, over 8 years ago
  Boo hiss non-designers :P
  5 points
  - Dylan Baskind, over 8 years ago
    "do you even illustrator bro?"
    4 points
    - Daniel Fosco, over 8 years ago
      bro, do u even x?
      1 point
- Luis La Torre, over 8 years ago
  There are designer millionaires?
  0 points
Ernest Ojeh, over 8 years ago
This is great news. Thank you Allan & Kelly for this great community.
Exciting times ahead!
5 points
Robert Cuzic, over 8 years ago
I think we need to weed out non-designers from this site. These hipsters transformed this site into a lame HN clone.
3 points
- Kemie Guaida, over 8 years ago
  Yes! Everyone has to pass a design test before being even allowed to browse on this site. We wouldn't want diversity here, would we?
  9 points
- Adam Brace, over 8 years ago
  Robert Cuzic, Web Developer Extraordinaire - So as a developer you'd be the first to go?
  6 points
- Laurens Spangenberg, over 8 years ago
  I think the issue is more an issue of blogspam and submissions of lower quality by people than one of "hipsters" invading DN.
  0 points
Daniel Archer, over 8 years ago
Exciting! I hope this will keep the community thriving.
3 points
Nice Shoes, over 8 years ago
Bookmarking / Saving favourite posts would be super.
2 points
- Katherine W, over 8 years ago
  This! Like Metafilter. (They also use favoriting as a proxy for their lists of trending/top posts.) It just feels fundamentally lacking for such a rich resource like DN to not let you "keep" the posts you find personally helpful.
  I currently copy/paste links to favorite posts into my Simplenote... pretty silly.
  0 points
Koen Bok, over 8 years ago
Great news!
2 points
Dylan Baskind, over 8 years ago
Although I'm sad to see LayerVault go, I've been a big admirer of Andrew / MetaLab's output over the years - great to have respected stewardship for the community.
1 point
Wesley Magness, over 8 years ago
Today is a good day
1 point
Razlan Hanafiah, over 8 years ago
This is great news, Designer News!
1 point
Jonathan Cutrell, over 8 years ago
I can't be more excited about this. I love the work Andrew has done in his career.
1 point
E Bensley, over 8 years ago
Fantastic! I'm glad it went to someone active in the community already. DN already has some form of sponsored content so it will be interesting to see what sort of products Andrew's people bring ot the table. This is probably the best outcome that could have happened in the situation, bravo guys!
1 point
Ivan Vásquez, over 8 years ago
It's awesome that this site is going to continue. I feel sorry that LayerVault had to shut down, but I never found a use for their service. I went back and forth with a customer rep last year, and he ended up agreeing that it didn't really fit my needs.
1 point
Jonathan Shariat, over 8 years ago
Good news for Designer News.
Glad it is in good hands, leaving good hands, and growing up!
1 point
Eugene Ross, over 8 years ago
Hard work pays off!
1 point
Nick W, over 8 years ago
Testing...
Not sure if this will show up, but
Under the new stewardship, do we really need the real, full name policy?
(I consider this a core difference in opinion and don't really want to open up a huge debate about this)
0 points
Kevin Smith, over 8 years ago
Great News for Designer News!
0 points
Anthony Morales, over 8 years ago
Congratulations to Andrew, Allan and Kelly! I'm so glad to see this community continue.
0 points
Daniël van der Winden, over 8 years ago
Nice! Good luck :-)
0 points
Tom Wood, over 8 years ago
Woo hoo!
GREAT news!
0 points
ミンニシオ。, over 8 years ago
This site needs a redesign.
0 points
- Laurens Spangenberg, over 8 years ago
  Why?
  0 points
  - ミンニシオ。, over 8 years ago
    Because the current design sucks.
    0 points
Bennett Wong, over 8 years ago
Nice vertical move on MetaLab's part. Everyone better go fix up their folios :)
0 points
Edwin de Jongh, over 8 years ago
Awesome, so happy that this community will live on!
0 points
Allen Wang, over 8 years ago
-1 points
Denis P., over 8 years ago
Please disclose the price
-1 points
- Sean O'Grady, over 8 years ago
  I don't think thats our business
  11 points
- Luis La Torre, over 8 years ago
  http://d2oadd98wnjs7n.cloudfront.net/file_attachments/42435/files/20130830043612-Dr._Evil_1_million_dollars.gif
  0 points

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