Regarding the Redesign

Hey everyone,

As you might have already noticed, the site went through a couple of changes over the last few days, and I wanted to take the opportunity to explain some of those.

First and most obvious is the visual redesign, even if it maintains the same minimalistic, bright look I personally find appealing (It’s also about the only thing I can aim for and look reasonable competent). This new theme gives us a more clearly defined header, footer and sidebar area, as well as a little more width for text and images, all of which are nice things to have.  What might be more immediately noticeable is the home page showing summaries instead of large walls of text and imagery.

This is imporant because of our second change, the reposting of previous articles. In the future this site will serve not just as a simple list of .pdfs and links, but also as a digital archive of our content. For now this means a whole lot of old content just went up, which isn’t terribly interesting if you’re already familiar with the magazine, but it shows the format we have in mind for coming issues.

Even though the magazine itself is the ideal place to read our content, since that’s where you’ll find the prettiest version, these belated digital versions have their advantages, too. Now when one of our articles relates to something else we see on the net, we can link people directly to it instead of asking to dig through a .pdf file. These reposts also provide the ideal place for commenting on specific pieces out of large issues. And if the new heaps of text make us more easily readable for search engines, well I’m not complaining.

I want to point out that even though we’ll provide content here on the site in the future, the shiny .pdf version isn’t going anywhere. I like the format, not because it’s pretty (though it is, and that helps), but because of the clear and, frankly, luxurious deadlines the bi-monthly timeframe gives me. I have plenty of obligations besides running this little project and usually these have to take priority because of short or inflexible deadlines. Editing is something I do in off hours. I devote a lot of time to it, it’s just not always clear when and where I can find that time.

So the extensively polished magazine will remain our prime format. But now that we do have this channel for online content, it would be a shame not to use it so we are looking into running the occasional online feature. Taylor Hidalgo, who has already been helping me with editing duties, is stepping up as our new Online Editor, which means he’ll still be helping me edit things, albeit somewhat more frequently. Together we’ll try to provide enough original content to balance the reposts, and generally keep the site busy so you don’t forget about us during our two month breaks.

If you’d like to help with that, we are also looking for writers. This isn’t technically a new development, but it’s only now that I finally realized it might be a good idea to have a dedicated page explaining our search for contributors and what working with us is like.

So we’re no longer just an infrequent magazine, we’re also something of an infrequent games site now.

If you have any questions regarding the redesign, reposting or contributing, let me know. I’d love to hear from you.

Cheers.