Is it any surprise, with so many actual newspapers are losing revenue at an exponential rate, that the site that hosted designers’ news pages for free has finally gone down?

I only discovered the the site went down last night, when Trinity tried to check on his portfolio and got an error message. The only blog post on the darkened site I found via a casual Google search was from Feb. 17. The front page’s message says:

Tim and I would like to thank the more than 13,000 designers that registered and posted pages to newspagedesigner.com over the years. It’s our hope that our site gave you a place to show off your work as well as get inspiration. We would also like to thank the Sun Journal for hosting the site these many years at no cost to you. If you have any questions you can email Time or I. If anybody would like to purchase the URL newspagedesigner.com you can contact David Costello at the Sun Journal.

Tim Frank & Eric Kaiser

I didn’t realize that NPD would go down so fast, especially since it seemed like their fundraising effort late last year seemed to be more successful than they’d anticipated. From the front page’s message, it doesn’t sound like they plan to bring NPD back, but the blog post from the 17th says otherwise:

And down it will stay until Tim Frank, Paul Wallen and their crew get the new-and-improved version running.

Which might take as much as a couple months, Tim says. So we’ll have to be patient.

Well, even if NPD comes back, I know Trinity has his portfolio saved, and I got right to business today buying him a domain name. Which, I think, everyone should do, anyway.