I personally look at every single design that is posted on YouMagine. Occasionally I will feature something that stands out, but this is a small portion of the designs posted on YouMagine. So, if your design does gets featured, it might be considered quite an honour to be on the front page for a while. But, how do you get your design featured?

The following recommendations you definitely increase the likelihood of getting your design featured:

• Valuable: At least interesting or useful to some other users. The design doesn’t have to be for everyone. That’s the beauty of the internet: there can be MANY, MANY obscure items, each one having value to someone who comes across it. The beauty is that thing are 3D printed on demand, so every thing that gets made has value to someone.
• Originality / innovation: The design should be your own or be a derivative or improvement over something someone has shared before. So: not a direct clone or files taken from another designer, it has to be developed at least a bit further.
• Reproducible: It should be possible to reproduce what you have made (if you include rare items that you can’t find nor print, it is hard to reproduce for others)
• Open source: As much as possible, allows for modification or improvements to be made. Set wiki-mode to enabled to allow registered members to contribute or update files and descriptions. Make sure you choose a license that allows derivatives. Also, include the native design files so people can build on top of your work. Parametric files are easily adjusted, so that’s also a plus, but definitely not required since it mostly applies to functional objects that have varying parameters.
• Attribution: If the design builds on the work of someone else, give credit to that person (e.g. username, to the design that inspired you).
• Ready to print files: even though source files are useful if someone wants to adjust something.
• Images: A great photo makes your design stand out! Showcase it nicely with images of the printed thing and also the context in which it can or should be used. A video is often the best format to show the latter.
• Documentation: Graphical assembly instructions (when assembly is required) are a big plus, so are instructions for use (unless that’s obvious)

Items that don’t become featured because they don’t meet these criteria still might be valued by other members. So don’t hesitate to share what you have! It’s also appreciated if you interact with people who provide feedback on your design, for instance by responding to “Issues” that people have opened and closing them when they’re resolved. You can also simply respond in the Comments section.

If you design many things and become followed by other YouMagine members, that will also increase the number of times your design is collected or voted “Favorite”. These stats also are factored in when deciding to feature a design.

Good luck and thank you for sharing!

Erik de Bruijn
Entrepreneur and software and hardware developer
(Co-)founder of Ultimaker, YouMagine and Stekker.app