Bydrishti: The Design Gallery Where Your Work Speaks, Not Your Name
There is a moment every designer knows intimately. You finish a piece of work. It might be a logo that took three weeks to get right. A brand identity where every color decision was argued over internally before anything was shown to the client. A UI that went through fourteen iterations before the spacing finally felt natural. A typographic poster where you stayed up until 2am moving a single element two pixels to the left and then two pixels back before realizing the first position was correct.
You finish it. You look at it. And you know, with the specific quiet confidence that only comes from genuine creative struggle, that this is the best thing you have made so far.
Then you post it online. And it gets forty seven likes.
The designer with four hundred thousand followers posted something average that same afternoon. It got sixty two thousand interactions. Their comment section is full of people calling it genius. Your post has three comments, two of which are from friends who were not going to say anything harsh regardless of quality.
This is not a story about bitterness. Most working designers I know are not bitter people. They are realistic people who have come to understand a structural truth about how design gets seen online, which is that identity precedes work almost everywhere. The name arrives before the design. The follower count is visible before the piece. The algorithm has already decided how many people will see the post based on previous engagement before a single person has looked at the actual work.
The result is a system where reputation compounds regardless of quality and quality struggles to compound regardless of reputation. Good work from unknown designers stays unknown. Average work from established names gets amplified. This is not anyone’s intention. It is simply what happens when identity is attached to creative work before the work has a chance to be evaluated.
I thought about this for a long time before deciding to build something about it.
The Idea That Started Everything
The word drishti comes from Sanskrit. It means vision, sight, perspective, the quality of seeing something with genuine attention. It is used across Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati and most other Indian languages, often to describe not just the act of looking but the quality of the gaze. When an artist is said to have drishti, it means they see something other people miss. When you give something your drishti, you are giving it your complete and undivided observation.
The name arrived before the concept had fully formed. I knew I wanted to build something about seeing design fairly. The word kept appearing in my thinking as the right frame for it.
The concept that eventually formed around the name was simple enough to explain in one sentence. What if you built a design gallery where nobody could see who made the work?
No profile. No name. No avatar. No follower count. No verification badge. No indication of whether the person behind the submission had been designing for two months or two decades. The design would arrive in the gallery and it would arrive alone. The only thing the community would have to respond to was the work itself.
This is drishti. It is live at nitinmonga.in/drishti/ and it is free. No subscription. No premium tier. No limited free plan that runs out.
What drishti Actually Is
drishti is a community design gallery where designers from anywhere in the world submit their work, get voted on by other designers, and watch quality rise to the top through the honest signal of community response rather than through the inherited momentum of an existing audience.
The gallery covers twelve categories. Logo Design and Brand Identity for the identity designers. UI and UX and Web Design for the product and interface designers. Typography for the lettering artists and type designers. Poster and Print, Packaging, Illustration, 3D and Motion, Photography, and Editorial round out the rest. There is an Other category for work that does not fit neatly anywhere else. If you made it and you are proud of it, it belongs on drishti.
The submission process takes about ninety seconds. You visit the submit page, upload your design image, type a title, choose a category, and hit submit. Your design is live in the New tab immediately. No waiting. No approval queue. No moderator reviewing it before it can be seen.
If you want to add more context you can. A brief description of the brief or your process. The tools you used, whether that is Figma, Illustrator, Photoshop, Blender, Procreate, After Effects or anything else. A link to your Instagram or Behance portfolio if you want people who discover your work to be able to find more of it. An email address if you want to be notified when your submission gets voted into the main feed.
All of those additional fields are optional. The only things required are the image, a title, and a category. Everything else is your choice.
The portfolio link is worth pausing on for a moment because it represents a specific design decision in how drishti works. Anonymity on the gallery itself does not mean anonymity forever. If your work earns attention and a viewer wants to find more of it, the portfolio link gives them that path. The anonymity is at the point of evaluation. Once someone has responded to the work and wants to know the designer behind it, the connection is available. This is the way it should work. The design opens the door. The designer is waiting on the other side if the viewer chooses to walk through.
The Voting System and Why It Matters
When your design enters the New tab it becomes visible to anyone who visits drishti. They can vote for it by clicking the vote button on your submission card. One vote per browser per submission. No gaming the system, no asking your followers to flood your submission with votes that would not be genuine responses to the work.
When a design receives three votes it is automatically promoted to the main feed. It appears in the Trending section alongside the highest voted work from the past seven days and in the Top section alongside the highest voted work of all time. The transition is automatic and instant. Three genuine votes from three people who responded to the work is the threshold.
Three is a deliberately low number and it was chosen deliberately. The goal is not to make it hard for good work to be seen. The goal is to ensure that the work appearing in the main feed has demonstrated at least a minimal signal of genuine community response. A design that receives three votes has shown that three people, none of whom know who made it, encountered it and responded positively enough to click the vote button. That is a real signal.
No editor decided it was good enough. No algorithm gave it a boost because the submitter had high engagement on previous posts. Three people looked at it and thought it deserved more eyes.
This is the community as curator. It is slower than an editorial model and messier than an algorithmic one. It is also more honest than either.
The drishti homepage has three tabs. The Trending tab shows the highest voted work from the last seven days. The New tab shows the most recently submitted work. The Top tab shows the highest voted work of all time across every category. Each tab gives a different lens on the same body of work depending on whether you want to see what is resonating right now, what has just arrived, or what has earned the most sustained response over time.
No Account, No Login, No Personal Attacks
The decision to require no login was initially practical. I wanted zero friction between arrival and submission. No email verification, no password creation, no profile setup, no welcome email sequence. You visit the site and you submit your work. That is the complete experience.
As I thought more carefully about what anonymity means for a design community, I realized the practical decision had implications that mattered more than the convenience of it.
When a designer submits work anonymously, they cannot be targeted personally. A negative response to their work stays where it belongs, as a reflection of whether the community responded to the design, rather than becoming directed hostility toward a specific person. There is no comment section on drishti. There is no way to send a message to a submitter. The vote is the only signal and the flag button is the only moderation mechanism available to visitors.
This makes drishti feel different from every other design community I have used. The energy in the gallery is concentrated entirely on the work because the work is all there is. There is nobody to perform for. There is nobody to compete with. There is just the design and the honest response it earns.
Designers who have experienced the specific exhaustion of putting vulnerable creative work in front of a comment section will understand why this matters. The work is already the most exposed part of the process. Adding a comment section to that exposure creates conditions for a kind of harm that has nothing to do with whether the design is good.
drishti removes that possibility structurally rather than asking moderators to police it reactively.
You are never required to attach your portfolio link or any identifying information to your submission. The design can exist in the gallery with no connection to you at all if that is what you prefer. The option to attach a portfolio link exists for designers who want the discovery path available. It is never a requirement and its absence does not affect how your work is displayed or how it gets voted on.
The Technical Side for Designers Who Want to Know
drishti is built on the same stack used across nitinmonga.in. Next.js handles the frontend and server-side logic. MySQL with Prisma manages the database. Cloudinary stores and transforms images. FingerprintJS handles vote integrity without requiring any personal information from voters.
The fingerprinting piece deserves explanation because it is the layer that makes anonymous voting meaningful rather than chaotic. Without any login system, the question of how you prevent vote manipulation is real and important. FingerprintJS generates a stable browser identifier that persists across incognito mode and private browsing. One person using one browser gets one vote per submission regardless of how many tabs they open or how many times they refresh. The mechanism is invisible to honest users and meaningful against casual gaming.
Image storage uses Cloudinary’s URL-based transformation system. Every design is uploaded once and served at different sizes for different contexts. The grid card, the individual design page, the thumbnail in related sections all use the same source file delivered through different URL parameters rather than separate upload operations. This keeps storage clean and delivery fast regardless of how many designs are in the gallery.
The auto-promotion logic is a database transaction. When a submission receives its third vote, the vote increment and the status change happen atomically. There is no race condition where a design could be stuck in the New tab after reaching the threshold. The promotion is immediate.
How drishti Fits into the Bigger Picture
drishti is part of a larger collection of free tools built at nitinmonga.in over the past year. Each tool exists because a real problem was encountered and the available free solutions were either not free or not good enough.
The UI Design Analyzer scores any uploaded design image across seven criteria including spacing, alignment, color usage, consistency, hierarchy, typography and corner rounding. It has scored more than three hundred and fifty real designs since launching, entirely through organic discovery without paid promotion.
The free ATS Resume Builder offers eight templates, a live ATS score that updates as you fill in each section, and free PDF and DOCX download with no watermark and no paywall at the download step. It exists because most resume builders claiming to be free require payment to actually retrieve the document you spent time creating.
The Brand QR Studio generates fully styled QR codes with custom colors, dot shapes, logo embeds and four real-world mockup previews before download. PNG, SVG and transparent PNG exports with no watermark on any of them.
The Design Proofreader checks any uploaded design image for spelling errors in English, Hindi and Punjabi using OCR, filling a gap that every other spell checker leaves open because they all require you to paste text rather than working directly on a design file.
The YouTube Keyword Tool fetches hundreds of autocomplete suggestions from YouTube’s own search data using a systematic expansion across alphabet suffixes, question words and intent modifiers, producing five hundred or more keyword suggestions from a single seed term.
Each of these tools is free. None of them have a watermark on their output. None of them require an account. None of them have a premium tier that gates the core functionality behind a subscription.
drishti follows the same philosophy. It is the community layer built on top of the tools. The tools help designers work better. drishti gives the work a place to be seen.
The Story Behind Why This Got Built Now
Twelve years of making things teaches you a specific lesson about creative confidence that is hard to articulate until you have lived it. The lesson is that the relationship between the quality of the work and the size of the audience that sees it is much weaker than anyone tells you when you start out.
You are told that if you make good work consistently the audience will find you. This is true eventually and for some people. It is also true that good work can be invisible for years while less careful work from louder voices fills the space that the good work deserved. Both things are true simultaneously and the friction between them is where most designers spend a significant part of their creative lives.
I built drishti because I wanted to do something about the second part of that truth without pretending the first part is not real. The audience does eventually find good work. But eventually is a word that asks a lot of designers who are still building confidence, still finding their voice, still making things in relative obscurity and wondering whether the work is actually as strong as they think it is.
drishti is for those designers specifically. It is for the person who made something genuinely excellent and wants an honest signal of whether the community responds to it before they know who made it. It is for the established designer who wants feedback that is not filtered through the social obligation of their follower base. It is for anyone who believes the design should be the first thing and the only thing evaluated.
The name means vision. The platform is an attempt to create conditions where the vision in the work can be seen clearly, without the noise that surrounds the person who made it.
How to Submit Your Work to drishti
Visit nitinmonga.in/drishti/submit/ and upload your best design. Choose a title and a category. Add optional context if you want. Click submit. Your work is live in seconds.
Then share the link to your submission. Not because you need votes from people who already know you and would vote regardless of the work. But because sharing the link puts the design in front of people who have never encountered your work before and have no reason to respond to it except genuine response to what they see.
That honest signal is what drishti is built to generate. That signal is what makes the votes meaningful. And those votes are what lifts good work into a gallery where more designers from more places can encounter it without any prior knowledge of who made it.
Your best work deserves a fair look.
Submit it at nitinmonga.in/drishti/ and let drishti give it one.
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