About
Created by two souls who were fed up.
Design IRL (Design in real life) is the work of two people. We made it for this industry, because we’d had enough of how it works.
Why we made it
This industry runs on hierarchy. The same few names get seen, again and again, while everyone else waits their turn. Plenty of good work goes unnoticed because of where its maker sits in the order, and that has nothing to do with the work.
We were fed up with it. So we built what we wished had been there all along: one open place where everything is democratized, and nobody needs permission to be found.
Who it’s for
Every budding individual and every budding company. A product brand with its first collection. A material brand no one has specified yet. An architect with one finished house and nobody to tell.
You should get discovered by the industry. That’s the whole idea.
What’s in it for us
Honestly, we don’t know.
Will we make money from this? We don’t know that either, and we’d be making it up if we told you otherwise. What we do know is that this needed to exist, so we made it.
How pages are made
Studios, makers, sellers and specialists, in every city, are listed for free. We start each page from public information on the business’s own website: its name, city, the people named as its founders, and its projects. We write a short factual record and link back. We don’t copy text or photo galleries.
We then write to the email address on that website, offering the page to its owner. Claimed pages carry a verified mark and are managed by the business itself.
We don’t keep visitors here. Every project leads to the website of the people who made it, and every product to the shop of the people who sell it. Nobody can pay to rank higher in the directory; sponsored places are always labelled.
Privacy & your data
Every page has a link to remove it. It takes one click, the page disappears at once, and all of it is deleted within 48 hours. We keep only the business name and web address, so we never list it again.
When you follow a link from Design IRL to a business’s website, we count the visit so the business can see what we send them. We don’t store your IP address; we keep a daily, one-way fingerprint so the same visit isn’t counted twice.
If you write to us below, we keep your name, email and message so we can reply. We don’t publish them or pass them on.
If you join, we keep your name and email, what you save and the questions you ask Ask Design IRL, only to run your account. Logged out, the chat keeps nothing. You can delete your account, and all of it, from your account page at any time.
Write to us
Say hello, show us your work, or tell us what we got wrong. It’s the two of us reading these.