Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, 1995.

Core77 started as coursework. Wikipedia says the site began as the graduate thesis of Stuart Constantine and Eric Ludlum in their final year at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and that it was launched in March 1995. It says the site was originally hosted at Interport, an early internet service provider in New York City, and later moved to its own domain. Core77 itself dated its start the same way in April 2015, when it wrote that it had come online twenty years earlier, the previous month.

Constantine told the World Design Organization in an interview published on 25 October 2016 how the project began. The organisation said that a little more than twenty years earlier Constantine, then an industrial design student at Pratt, and his classmate Ludlum worked on a special project for their last semester: a website with online portfolios, articles, jobs and other resources about industrial design. Constantine said that at the time it was hard to explain to people what industrial design was, and that one early aim was to educate the public by highlighting people and projects.

The interview described how the site grew. Constantine said companies and industrial designers began asking to be featured, and that it snowballed from there. The World Design Organization said Core77’s focus had shifted to highlighting notable design work from individuals and companies, especially through its job and portfolio site Coroflot, and that this had led to the Core77 Design Awards and a conference, Designing Here / Now.

Core77 describes the same beginning in its 2025 anniversary post. It says the site was founded by Ludlum and Constantine while they were graduate students at Pratt, and launched during the dial-up era as a graduate thesis project.

Partners, a masthead and a network of sites.

Core77 is run by its two founders and a third partner. In its 2025 anniversary post, Core77 says Allan Chochinov was the site’s original editor-in-chief and continues to guide the publication as a partner in the business alongside Ludlum and Constantine. It describes Chochinov as chair of the MFA Products of Design programme at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and names Rain Noe as Core77’s senior editor. The same post says Core77 remains independent.

The current masthead on the site puts the founders in two distinct roles. Core77 lists Eric Ludlum as editorial director, Stuart Constantine as publisher, Allan Chochinov as editor at large and N. Rain Noe as senior editor, alongside a contributing editor and an advertising and sponsorships lead. The site’s footer credits Core77, Inc.

The name now sits on a small network rather than a single magazine. Core77’s about page says the site has served industrial designers since 1995, from students to experienced professionals, and that it publishes articles, discussion forums and an event calendar, and hosts portfolios, job listings and a database of design firms, schools, vendors and services. It says Core77 also produces design competitions, lecture series, parties and exhibits. The footer groups three sister properties under the heading of the network: Coroflot for design jobs and portfolios, a design directory of firms, and the Core77 Design Awards, which Wikipedia says were founded in 2011.

Events carry the name into physical spaces. The World Design Organization reported that Core77’s Designing Here / Now conference took place on 29–30 September 2016 at Vibiana, a converted church venue in Los Angeles, and said the next edition was planned for Chicago in October 2017. In 2015 Core77 announced that Constantine would speak about twenty years of online publishing at an event in Santa Monica, California.

Mastheads, newsletters and the site itself.

Design-media identities live under unusual pressure, because the people reading them are the same people who make logos, set type and judge layouts for a living. A masthead or wordmark on a design title is read twice: once as a name, and again as a statement of taste. That is one reason so many of these names are set in lowercase, compressed into a single word, or reduced to a short monogram that can sit in a browser tab, a social avatar and a printed cover without changing shape.

Online, the identity is rarely a fixed object. Site redesigns arrive every few years, and each one quietly rewrites the brand: the grid, the article template, the image ratios and the type pairing often say more than the logo does. Newsletters have become a second front page, where a sender name, a subject-line voice and a recurring header carry the identity into the inbox. Events, talks and award programmes add a third surface, turning a publication’s name into signage, lanyards, trophies and stage screens. Studying a design-media brand means looking at all of these together, not only at the mark.

Products made by a magazine, dated.

Core77 has occasionally turned from covering products to making them. In an interview with the design researcher Steve Portigal, published on Portigal’s website and in condensed form in Ambidextrous magazine, Ludlum described two projects. Portigal wrote that in 2009 Core77 launched its own product, the Dutch Master bicycle, made in New York City, after an earlier experiment with a Fila sneaker called the Blu Fom in the mid-2000s.

Ludlum explained the sneaker’s name in that interview. He said it came from the blue insulation foam that industrial designers used for mock-ups, both ergonomic models and appearance models, and that it had been a staple of the design process when he was a student in the mid-1990s. He called the shoe an insider’s take on industrial design, and said the work with Fila was central to how the project was presented on the web and pushed out to other blogs.

The bicycle had a different starting point. Ludlum told Portigal that the Dutch Master began with manufacturing in New York City and the disappearance of local production there, and that the project was built around a frame from Worksman, which he said had been made in the city for more than a century. He said several people at Core77 commuted by bike, which made a bicycle a natural choice. He described Core77’s background as a magazine where design stories get told, and said that with the Dutch Master the team got to write the story as well as promote it.

Core77 marked its thirtieth year in 2025 by asking designers to choose designs from the past three decades for a virtual time capsule, offering a sticker set to people who took part.

For a design guide, Core77 shows how a student project can keep its original name and founders for three decades while adding jobs, awards and events around it. Compare designboom, another online design magazine, and Dieline, a site built around packaging design. For this guide we use blue foam, model orange and drafting black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Core77’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.