Introducing the New CartoonBrew.com
Cartoon Brew, America’s most-visited animation industry source, relaunches today with a complete redesign of CartoonBrew.com.
The reimagined website, designed and coded by the unflappable and brilliant Aric Harris, employs a bold, technologically-forward framework that makes our content easier to find and read than ever before.
Here’s some of the new features:
Responsive design: With around 40% of Cartoon Brew visitors now reading the site on mobile and tablet devices, readers can find elegantly optimized pages for their smartphones and tablets, as well as desktop.
Fast-loading: We know that you’re busy and we value that you choose to spend your time with us. Our new site architecture, rebuilt from the ground-up, eliminates many plug-ins and localizes other features to reduce the amount of JavaScript on the site, making pages lightweight and faster-loading. It also allows for quicker page development and more flexible design possibilities, so that we can continue to serve the needs of our ever-growing readership.
Continuous scroll and siderail: Auto-loading posts eliminate the need for repeated clicks to find the latest industry news. If you want to catch up on all of the day’s stories, simply scroll downward and new stories will appear. The siderail, present on every desktop page, gives you convenient access to all of our newest stories, regardless of your landing page on the site.
Easier to read and navigate: Our key focus for this redesign was to improve the user experience and to display our content to it best advantage. We’ve reduced the amount of ancillary content throughout every version of the site, highlighting editorial content without burdening users with extraneous information. We’ve also upgraded to clean typefaces designed for online reading (Ideal Sans and Mercury). A drop-down menu in the upper-left corner always connects you to our most popular site features.
Still to come:
Curation: Our editorial team has expanded in the past year and Cartoon Brew now publishes more weekly content than ever before. Over the coming weeks, you’ll see the introduction of smart post groupings that will create additional depth and meaningful context for critical issues in the animation world.
Video platform: We’ve always presented video content, but as we start to produce more original video content in the coming months, we will introduce a dedicated platform for showcasing video series.
As is normal with any new design, it’ll take a bit of time to work out all the kinks and make everything work smoothly again. Our normal commenting system, Disqus, is temporarily down, but it’ll be back up shortly. In the meantime, please share your thoughts on the new design. Now in our twelfth year, Cartoon Brew chronicles the breadth of the animation art and industry like few others, and we’re committed to keeping it the most vital, timely, and informative animation news and education resource online.
