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Handles and profiles

Every account has a handle, and every handle has a profile. This is your identity on brilliant.design: the address people visit, the name on your projects and drops, and the front page of your work.

Your handle

When you sign up, Brilliant assigns you a friendly word-pair handle automatically, something like @blue-penguin. Nothing from your email address is ever used or published; the handle is generated, not derived from who you are.

Your profile lives at brilliant.design/{handle}, and your handle is what appears in every project and drop URL you publish.

Your profile page

Your profile is organized into four tabs:

  • Overview: your README, your pinned and recent projects, and a year-long activity graph.

  • Projects: everything you have published.

  • Drops: your published drops.

  • Stars: the projects and drops you have starred. The tab counts both, and the page renders as a wall of tiles, the same layout as Explore. Starring is public, so anyone can see what you keep here. See Projects for how it works.

Every star and fork count you see, on a project or a drop, is a button. Click a star count to see who starred it, or a fork count to see the forks people made from it: both open the same activity list, on the tab you clicked. It is the same list whether you open it from a project card, a drop's page, or a drop tile.

Two nice details worth knowing:

  • Your README is just a project. Create a project named exactly your handle, put a README.md at its root, and it becomes the README card on your profile. Editing your profile intro is editing a design file, the same way everything else works.

  • Pin your best work. You can pin up to six projects to the top of your Overview so visitors see your strongest work first.

You also carry a Member #N, your permanent early-adopter number. It never changes, even if you rename your handle.

Changing your handle

You can change your handle any time. Old links do not break: visits to your previous handle redirect to your current one, so anything already shared keeps working.

Short handles

Handles of six characters or more are free. A short handle, anything under six characters, is a paid feature. If you try to claim one on the Free plan, Brilliant shows it as available and points you to upgrade, but you cannot save it until you are on a paid plan. See Plans and billing.

The blue badge

Paid accounts get a blue badge on their profile. It is derived live from your plan, so it appears when you are on a paid plan and disappears if you go back to Free. Nothing else about your profile changes.

The 30-day reclaim window

When you rename away from a handle, or if a paid account lapses and its short handle is released, that handle is not instantly up for grabs. It enters a 30-day reclaim window during which links still redirect and you can take it back. Reclaiming a short handle requires a paid plan, since short handles are paid to begin with. After the window, the handle is free for anyone.

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