The site nndesign.ru belonged to the Nizhny Novgorod Union of Designers, a public association of Nizhny Novgorod designers founded in early 2001[1]. The domain was listed in the nn.ru catalog (the "/rub/" section)[1], and the earliest known snapshot of its home page in the web archive is dated May 26, 2002[1].

What the site offered

According to the text of the home page, membership in the Union was open to an "actively working designer who, through their labor, has made a significant contribution to the development of Nizhny Novgorod design," and whose professional standing was recognized by colleagues[1]. As the home page stated, the organization was meant to "separate the wheat from the chaff" and show society "the real designers — the elite of the profession"; the site described the idea of the Union as "the idea of creating a guild, of creating a corporate professional environment"[1].

Members of the organization declared their agreement with the views on the relationship between designer and society, designer and client, and designer and fellow professionals promoted by the international associations ICOGRADA, ICSID, and IFI, and stated they were guided by the "Code of Conduct for Designers" adopted by these organizations[1]. The site provided background on these associations: ICOGRADA (the International Council of Graphic Design Associations) was founded in London in 1963; ICSID (the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design) was founded in 1957 and, at the time of publication, had about 150,000 members, influencing roughly a million and a half people in the industry; IFI (the International Federation of Interior Architects/Designers), founded in 1963, represented 57 professional associations, organizations, and design schools from 39 countries on five continents[1].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The project was listed in the nn.ru catalog as a Nizhny Novgorod design resource[1], but in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter and the voting records of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day, no data on nndesign.ru's ranking or votes has been recorded — not a "zero result," but the project's absence from the available slices of the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating. How visible the site was against the backdrop of the rest of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of that era cannot be judged from this data.

How it closed

No live content of the Union of Designers survives in the later snapshots: the domain is recorded in a parked state as early as 2014, and earlier years after 2002 have not been checked[2]. A snapshot from December 19, 2021 shows a standard page from the registrar RU-CENTER (nic.ru) offering the domain for sale at 29,000 rubles — no trace of the design organization remains on the page, only the standard text about the sale of released domain names[2]. The last snapshot of the domain recorded in the web archive is from October 2022[2].

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page (parked), 2021 (archive)