The Defining Moments That Made Up

600,000 creatives make one hell of a community

Published in

Up Blog

3 min readAug 17, 2016

It’s cliché but oh so true — when we launched MaterialUp in December 2014, a tiny site that featured one great Material Design example a day, we just had NO idea what we were getting ourselves into.

Fast forward to August 2016, and there were more than 100,000 designers and developers registered and connecting through Up 🎉 (previously known as UpLabs). Now, there are more than 600,000 members in the Up community.

That’s a cool number (and we celebrated) but beyond that, here are the defining moments that made Up what it is today:

When MaterialUp was initially launched as a side project

and got encouraging thumb ups :)

When we first discussed the idea of taking liberties with the Material Design Guidelines.

Then faced quite a bit of backlash, wrote about how as creatives we should always strive to explore and bend the rules — hem, guidelines — which really strengthened the community and marked the first time we felt it existed.

“Cards in a list are a no-no. But, that’s uh, kind of how Trello functions” ~ Fyza Hashim

When we organized a live Q&A with Mike Denis from Google Design

And burning questions from the community were finally answered and mysteries were solved! I mean…

When we realized that developers and designers connected through the site.

And we decided to feature more of those design concepts that developers turn into code. And it started something!

So we published a few more :)

When that Periodic Table concept got so popular that developers lined up to build it.

And it’s now live as Isotope :) (Read the full story )

When the community started using MaterialUp to share iOS resources — so we launched iOSUp.

And then SiteUp. And a new shiny roof for all of them, called Up (previously UpLabs) — a place for all designers and developers to find and share the resources they need everyday.

We have now reached 600,000 registered designers and developers!

We have a whole lotta people to thank: amazing members from the community who truly help make it happen every day, the lovely people from Google Design who gave us a bunch of thumbs up when we first launched MaterialUp, our group partners at YC who believe in us and push us so hard!, the many other entrepreneurs and creatives who inspire us through their own journey.

Up is a community that has grown significantly since the time it was MaterialUp, and we hope that the community continues to grow.

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