Insight

A Look into the .DESIGN Trend with Big Companies: tacobell.design and more!

Samantha Lloyd on April 16, 2019

If your company is a fair size, we can probably predict that it has a marketing team. If it has a marketing team, we can assume it has a designer – or hopefully many! Your marketing and design teams work hand-in-hand to put forth initiatives and drive click-throughs, sales, (and maybe even virality!) to your product or service. A lot of the strategies and reasoning behind what your team implements go unnoticed, so it’s fun to show the thought process and ideas involved in an entire marketing strategy. Taco Bell has done this and more on their new design-focused website, tacobell.design. We’re going to take a dive into what Taco Bell, and other brands, have created and why it’s important for brands to think of their design and marketing strategies and teams as something worth paying tribute to and dedicating a space online to. See how brands like Taco Bell, Uber, Facebook, Airbnb, and Adobe are using their brand’s .DESIGN domain extension.

Any good marketer will tell you that it’s not just their design concept, or just their content, or just their ads that made a strategy a success. It’s every piece of the puzzle coming together. There are ample strategies involved in creating a new brand, or any idea surrounding, to ensure it resonates with customers as well as those who are newly introduced to your brand. One of the best ways to highlight these strategies is to show customers all the thinking involved in each stage of your rebrands, website improvements, product iterations, and other design changes. Many big brands are choosing to publish their design thoughts on a .DESIGN domain name.

Use .DESIGN to Show Off Your Design Team

Taco Bell has used their .DESIGN domain name to do something a bit different and creative – they’ve built a website that showcases their design team and the projects their design team has built. Tons of their familiar brand and marketing initiatives are on their Work page and list who the design team was behind the Creative and the Account, as well as any awards won. They use their Play page to promote their Instagram. The About page highlights their vast design team. You get to meet the people behind all their design work.

tacobell.design

Use .DESIGN to Show Off Your Rebrand

When your company goes through an extensive rebrand, it’s fun to let people know the who, what, when, where, and why behind what was created. A .DESIGN domain name is a great spot to play host to the thinking behind the new elements of the design your brand will be using going forward. Uber’s .DESIGN website is a great example of how a brand can show their thought process behind a redesign and explain the story.

If you haven’t gone through a full rebrand, but still want to highlight awesome projects surrounding design that your company does, the .DESIGN domain name is a great place to compile all that work. Taco Bello used their design website to not only describe their design team, but to show all the strategies behind a lot of their creations. Your company doesn’t need to make a significant change in their brand to justify showing design projects.

uber.design

Use .DESIGN to Talk About Design

Design impacts and infiltrates everything we do. The most popular use of the .DESIGN domain name is a place for companies, like Facebook, Adobe, and Airbnb to share their team’s experiences with design and how they use design to improve their product or service. This provides a good place to discuss everything from how your company is improving accessibility in design, to top trends for the year in web design, to how user-centric design benefits your product. This is a great way to let customers know you’re always thinking in a design-first mindset and that your company cherishes the talent it has. As well, it provides a space for open discussion with your customers and fans with regards to design. Give your company’s designers a place to share their insights with a .DESIGN domain name.