And we’re live! As you can see, Colossal looks quite a bit different today as we launch a new identity and website. This is somehow our fifth iteration of Colossal in 14 years, and we’re so excited to finally share it with you.
It has not been easy. Tears have been shed. Hair pulled. Color palettes mixed. Fonts adjusted. Images re-cropped. Servers moved. Shameful quantities of pizza consumed.
Colossal was founded in 2010, a time when artists religiously updated their portfolios on their personal websites, and finding their work meant reading an art magazine or visiting a gallery. This was before most of us carried the internet in our pockets and before social media ballooned into the dominant but fractured force it is today. Blogging was even declared “dead.”
But Colossal thrived. It grew along with platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr and was featured in one of the first Apple iPad commercials. Soon, readers were crashing our server repeatedly when post after post went viral. In those early days, this translated to advertising revenue and allowed us to grow from a staff of one to two and three and so on. Of course, Colossal always remained free.
What originally started as a blog eventually became the online magazine it is today with regular contributors and millions of readers. In 2019, we launched a membership program to support our work, fund salaries, and keep the lights on. For us and most independent magazines publishing on the internet, viral traffic and robust advertising are no longer a guarantee.
This is all to say that the internet and publishing ecosystem of Colossal’s inception is not the same as today. Our previous website launched in 2017, and although it’s served us well for the last seven years, we were due for a major update.
Last October, we reached out to Firebelly, an incredible design studio here in Chicago. We’ve worked with their team for the past few months to refine what Colossal is and shape our new identity—you’ll hear more from them about the process in the coming weeks—and because of the diligent work of our developer Jordon Rupp and illustrator Natalie Shilo, we’re finally ready to share it with you.
So, what’s new?
Bookmarking
The ability to save an article has long been our—and your!—wishlist. To use this feature, simply click on the Bookmark button under the headline or on an image to add it to your dashboard. Bookmarking is exclusive to Colossal Members, so you’ll need to log in to take full advantage of it.
Teachers frequently cite Colossal as a useful classroom resource from K-12 to university settings, and education is one of our core values. To make art more accessible, we’ve added a glossary to help explain and provide examples of some of the most common terms and techniques. We even included short biographies of artists everyone should know. The glossary is designed for students and lifelong learners alike.
We’ve also added a new search option called Explore that allows you to read the site more visually. We’ve fixed more than 3,000 broken links, manually reformatted thousands of articles, and deleted roughly 500 posts that no longer live up to our editorial standards. The archive is really worth exploring now. Dive in.
As you navigate the website over the next few weeks, please reach out and let us know if you experience anything exceptionally wonky or have feedback in general. And as always, thank you for reading.
