And we’re stay! As you may see, Colossal appears fairly a bit totally different in the present day as we launch a brand new identification and web site. That is one way or the other our fifth iteration of Colossal in 14 years, and we’re so excited to lastly share it with you.
It has not been simple. Tears have been shed. Hair pulled. Coloration palettes blended. Fonts adjusted. Photographs re-cropped. Servers moved. Shameful portions of pizza consumed.
Colossal was based in 2010, a time when artists religiously up to date their portfolios on their private web sites, and discovering their work meant studying an artwork journal or visiting a gallery. This was earlier than most of us carried the web in our pockets and earlier than social media ballooned into the dominant however fractured pressure it’s in the present day. Running a blog was even declared “useless.”
However Colossal thrived. It grew together with platforms like Fb, Twitter, and Tumblr and was featured in one of many first Apple iPad commercials. Quickly, readers had been crashing our server repeatedly when put up after put up went viral. In these early days, this translated to promoting income and allowed us to develop from a employees of 1 to 2 and three and so forth. In fact, Colossal all the time remained free.
What initially began as a weblog finally turned the net journal it’s in the present day with common contributors and thousands and thousands of readers. In 2019, we launched a membership program to assist our work, fund salaries, and maintain the lights on. For us and most unbiased magazines publishing on the web, viral site visitors and strong promoting are now not a assure.
That is all to say that the web and publishing ecosystem of Colossal’s inception shouldn’t be the identical as in the present day. Our earlier web site launched in 2017, and though it’s served us effectively for the final seven years, we had been due for a significant replace.
Final October, we reached out to Firebelly, an unimaginable design studio right here in Chicago. We’ve labored with their group for the previous few months to refine what Colossal is and form our new identification—you’ll hear extra from them in regards to the course of within the coming weeks—and due to the diligent work of our developer Jordon Rupp and illustrator Natalie Shilo, we’re lastly able to share it with you.
So, what’s new?
Bookmarking
The flexibility to avoid wasting an article has lengthy been our—and your!—wishlist. To make use of this characteristic, merely click on on the Bookmark button underneath the headline or on a picture so as to add it to your dashboard. Bookmarking is unique to Colossal Members, so that you’ll have to log in to take full benefit of it.
Academics often cite Colossal as a helpful classroom useful resource from Okay-12 to school settings, and training is one among our core values. To make artwork extra accessible, we’ve added a glossary to assist clarify and supply examples of among the most typical phrases and strategies. We even included quick biographies of artists everybody ought to know. The glossary is designed for college kids and lifelong learners alike.
We’ve additionally added a brand new search possibility known as Discover that permits you to learn the location extra visually. We’ve mounted greater than 3,000 damaged hyperlinks, manually reformatted hundreds of articles, and deleted roughly 500 posts that now not stay as much as our editorial requirements. The archive is absolutely value exploring now. Dive in.
As you navigate the web site over the following few weeks, please attain out and tell us should you expertise something exceptionally wonky or have suggestions normally. And as all the time, thanks for studying.