r/Design rules, stats, and what to post

This is a community for design, and the rules make clear it is for functional design work, meaning pieces that were designed for a functional purpose. The people posting here are designers sharing their own work or the work of others, asking design questions, and giving each other feedback. It is explicitly not a place for self-promotion, job hunting, or recruitment, and the rules point people to other subreddits for those things. It is also not a place for memes, low effort posts, or artwork with no functional purpose.

The first rule that decides survival is “No promotional/commercial activities.”, which bans promoting your own products, services, brand, or shop, including your design services. Then there is “If posting someone else's work, credit them appropriately.”, which requires the right flair and honest credit for anything inspired by another person's design. “All shared work must have a comment for context.” means every shared piece needs a comment explaining the objective, the audience, and your design decisions. “No basic/repeated questions.” tells you to search before asking anything. “This is not a “homework” forum.” stops you from getting other designers to do your work for you. “No memes, AI farming and low-quality posts” removes memes, low effort posts, and obvious AI-generated content, and AI posts can get you banned. Finally, “Is it suitable for this sub?” requires that artwork here was designed for a functional purpose.

The honest answer for a founder is that this community is close to off limits for direct marketing, because rule one bans promoting your own products, services, brand, or shop. What can work is showing up as a designer first. Share functional design work you genuinely made, like an interface, a product, or a designed object, and write a comment explaining the objective, the audience, and your design decisions. If your work draws on another designer's ideas, credit them and use the right flair. Ask specific, non-obvious design questions that you could not answer with a quick search, and be ready to give and take feedback politely. If you want to hire or promote, the rules themselves point you to r/designjobs, r/forhire, r/jobs, or r/picrequests instead.

The fastest removal is any kind of promotion, so do not push your product, your service, your brand, your shop, or your design services, and do not use the sub for surveys, social media pushing, job ads, or recruitment. Do not post someone else's work without the 'Someone Else's Work' flair and proper credit, and do not claim inspired work as fully your own, because repeat offenders get banned. Do not post work without a context comment, because that alone gets it removed. Do not ask basic or repeated questions, and never ask the community to do your job for you. Keep comments civil even when you get critical feedback, because uncivil discussion is removed. Memes, low effort posts, and obvious AI-generated content are removed, and AI posts can earn a ban. Pure art with no functional purpose belongs elsewhere.

The rule that jumps out at me is “Is it suitable for this sub?”, because it draws a hard line between design and pure art, and most founders guess wrong on that. I also like that the community demands a context comment for every shared piece, which is exactly the habit that makes any post better. No top posts showed up in our observations for this one, so treat it as a room where craft and honesty carry you, not clever titles.