After three and a half years we felt it was time to rethink Quipsologies, which has been a slow-but-steady grower within our network of blogs, and has served as an ongoing excuse for us to spend time online looking at cool things. Although we liked the simplicity and directness of the previous version we decided to get a little more ambitious with it and, to be honest, we love the process of redesigning our own web sites. So, here is what’s new and what’s old.

Images
The main change is that there are now big, juicy images. We are visual people and respond better to graphic stimulus, so why avoid the obvious? Plus, honestly, there were times where something was so hard to describe in words that we just passed on posting it. Now we can just show it to you.

Open Stream, Closed
The second biggest change is that we have taken away the ability for anyone to immediately post on what we called the “Community” side. Our main reason for doing this is that many people took advantage to link to their own sites to drive traffic, rather than making thoughtful contributions that weren’t self-serving. We still believe in the contributions of our readers so we have made it very easy to submit Quips through the form to your left.

Team Effort
We noticed that the best Community Quips in the last three years came from recurring contributors, so we have invited them to be official contributors and help us generate content. Our inaugural Quipsologists have been contributing to the site for many years and we are delighted they will continue to do so. They are: Plamen, Doug Bartow, Josh Berta, James I Bowie, Ricardo Cordoba, and Diane Zerr. We are happy to hear from anyone who might be interested in becoming a regular contributor.

Variety
While we will focus on short Quips that point elsewhere, you can expect some variety with original content and slightly longer bits of writing and visual essays, as well as the opportunity to comment on these. You will also see more Quips about branding and identity as well as of printed projects because Quipsologies now will also serve as a feed for interesting links to Brand New and FPO. From the Archives drop-down menu you can see the Quips that have been tele-transported to those sites.

Nice Type
This is our first foray into web fonts and we are using Typekit to render P22 Underground, Skolar Web by TypeTogether, and Coquette by Mark Simonson. Since PC computers render these fonts like dog food, we have an alternate style sheet that can be switched to from underneath the Quipsologies logo for those who prefer to see things in Arial and Georgia.

Thanks
That’s it. We hope you enjoy the new version.

We Kid, because we Love
The above are an homage to our favorite blogs, from which we regularly draw content to populate Quipsologies. If we didn’t get the link first, you can be sure that they did, and that’s why we come back to them time and again.