Who are we?
Prototypr is an independent design discovery platform and newsletter that started off as a side project over 6 years ago, with a mission to share and discuss ideas around design, prototyping, code and beyond. It grew to 600k+ monthly readers, over 5,000 writers, and then a small indie team - all along following an Open Design ethos:
“The idea of Open Design is one of sharing knowledge openly, to invite people to collaborate and learn from eachother, thereby improving the community as a whole.”
This year Prototypr won a flagship award from Grant for the Web to democratise design education with an open source publishing platform. No more paywalls or popups, the new platform is being made truly accessible and open to everyone through a new technology called called Web Monetization – it's an alternative to gated content and ads. You can find out more about our open source grant project here. We're also part of Adobe's grant program.
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Why publish on Prototypr?
Be part of a change - together we can create a more open,fair, and inclusive web for designers and developers! Have you noticed, there's been a rise in paywalls and invasive ads on the web? Traditionally, blogs in the design industry were openly accessible for anyone to read. However, throughout 2016 to today, there's been a rise in centralised publishing platforms that optimise for paywalled business models, which also prioritise English language and Western culture, thereby restricting access to free learning and limiting its availability around the world.
Our open source project aims to bring back and build upon aspects of an accessible web. We’re developing Prototypr as an inclusive Web Monetized publishing platform for designers, that rewards contributors whilst democratising design education by providing openly accessible, quality content across different cultures. By publishing with us, you'll get all of this:
🌐 Change the web: No paywalls. Privacy-first, and built for people of different ability and backgrounds.
Earn recognition: Your work will be distributed via our newsletters - we have a large following who also receive a selection of the best content bi-weekly via our curated newsletter; if your article hits all the high notes, your literary masterpiece might be slipped in and read by a further 50,000 humans. Your work deserves to be seen - consider us your personal plinth.
✍️ Editing assistance: Prototypr editors aim to help you improve the quality of your articles to deliver quality content to our readers. These professionals have years of experience in helping to shape people’s content to ensure effective delivery. It’s your boat, we’re just rigging it to make sure its voyage is as smooth as possible. We will also source images relevant to your piece, saving you plenty of time and a potential copyright lawsuit.
Reach a wider audience: the new Prototypr platform is built to reach and support people of different abilities and cultures. Internationalisation is now built into the core of Prototypr, and we're working on translating the best articles to reach other audiences, starting with Spanish.
Web Monetization: Free, unbiased, and quality design material is increasingly hard to come by with the rise in paywalls and privacy-invasive ads. The Open Source, Web Monetized Prototypr platform explores an alternative model that keeps the web open to readers, whilst rewarding writers.
And if that’s not enough to wet your whistle, we'll soon be ramping up our new and improved platform with improved author showcase pages and interviews to show off your work. More exposure = more engagements = more tuckshop money for you. Winner.
Draft submissions
To submit an article:
Create a Prototypr Author account and set up your profile with bio and images. Let us know via email or twitter!
Send us your draft via email (hello at prototypr . io) or twitter
Need any help? Contact us via email (hello at prototypr . io)
We'll be updating this document with more guidelines and topic suggestions soon! Please submit your drafts in a Google Doc, Dropbox Paper, or something similar – our own editor is coming soon.
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