The Redesign That Got in Its Own Way

The feedback was mostly polite about it. Bold, they said. Interesting. But also too big, too cluttered, too inconsistent—not quite right for what this place is supposed to be. And honestly? They weren’t wrong.

It was an experiment, which is the polite way of saying I went temporarily mad and rebuilt the whole thing just to see what would happen. To do something nobody had done before, which in retrospect was not the most shocking outcome I could have aimed for. But it mattered at the time. Getting out of whatever groove I’d been grinding into, throwing something at the wall. Making the mess is the only way to see past it.

Sara and I sat down and went through the feedback together. The content direction was never really in question—back to proper stories mixed with nonsense, photos, videos, nipples, everything that used to make this feel worth reading. The design question was harder, because both of us had opinions and neither of us was fully sold on the experiment anymore.

So we went back to what worked, roughed it up a little, made it wider and cleaner with more room to breathe. Something between a blog and a magazine again, which is what this has always been at its best—that mix of deliberate and casual, long and short, serious and completely stupid.

What I’m most relieved about is being able to write again without design anxiety sitting on my shoulder. It’s the worst kind—gets between you and the actual work, makes you second-guess every word because you’re still distracted by the frame. That’s done now. We move.