As most readers have likely noticed by now, we launched a rather substantial redesign of the site yesterday morning. There are minor tweaks, particularly to the Mobile version, to come in the next few days as I continue to work with Zohair and the rest of his WordPress team, but I expect it to remain mostly the same for some time to come.
I thought it would be interesting to showcase the site’s visual evolution. (For a more comprehensive look at how the site has changed over 23 years and change, see my OTB at 20 post.)
Here’s what we looked like in April 2003, a mere three months into the site’s existence and right after moving to its own domain from Google’s BlogSpot service:
The first professional (i.e., not-by-me) design launched in January 2008. Here’s the earliest Wayback Machine capture of that look:
The logo and site colors, minus the taupe that finally disappeared with yesterday’s update, have remained the same ever since.
In May 2010, we made the biggest change, arguably to this date, in moving from a simple reverse-chronological blog format into a magazine-style site. Here’s the earliest capture:
The February 2018 design that persisted until yesterday was reflected more on the backend—and being radically more mobile-friendly. By the January 2019 capture, we’d also dropped advertising:
And, finally, the last capture of the current site before my announcement post yesterday morning:
