Today, we have a brand new Verge for you. It's radically new. You just have to start over.
The idea of an unfinished interface between the present and the future led to the creation of our new logo. We have a bright new color scheme that shows our work in a new way. We have new type across the board. There are ink traps in our new headline fonts. I think they're great.
All of those things were designed and developed with great care, and they will serve as the foundation for our site and our brand for years to come. Our new design reflects that we are meant to be boundary-pushing.
The redesign isn't about new colors or typefaces. Not really a lot.
We wanted to redesign the relationship we have with you, our fans. We developed a design system six years ago that was meant to travel across platforms as the media unbundled itself into article pages individually distributed by social media and search engines. We had bright pink pull quotes in articles and laser lines shooting across our videos because we wanted to be distinctive.
You can only publish on other people's platforms. The more we lived with that decision, the more convinced we were that our own platform should be an antidote to editorial products made by people with intent and expertise. It should be a statement about what the internet can be at its best when the Verge's homepage is the most popular at the company.
We sat down and thought about what was important to us and how to make our home page more valuable. We thought about where we came from and how we got to where we are now. We just need to keep writing.
We are going back to basics with the Storystream newsfeed on our website. To bring the best of old-schoolBlogging to a modern experience and to have our editors and senior reporters constantly updating the site with the best of tech and science news from around the internet is our plan. We trust that our feed will be useful enough to have you come back later, and we are happy to send people to excellent work elsewhere if that is what it takes. We can do that if that means we just need to add the TikTok or wacky CEO to the mix. I'm excited that we can point people to interesting threads on the forums. The internet is a good place to find good conversations.
We are moving all of our comments to the Coral platform, which has a lot of fun features. Our executive editor wrote an entire post about it.
We won't have to stop everything we're doing and debate writing an entire story about one dude's confused content moderation on social media, thanks to this. If they are important, we can add context and move on. We will get back hours upon hours of time to do more original reporting, deeper reviews, and even more analysis. It will be easier for us to show off our award-winning work when they are relevant to the news of the day. I can't wait to see what our art and video teams do with the new access to our homepage.
This new site is the biggest reinvention of The Verge since we started it.
When you embark on a project to completely remake a giant site that makes a lot of money, you inevitably get asked questions about conversion metrics and KPIs. You will have to run away from people who are trying to start a conversation about side doors.
There is only one goal here, and that is to make The Verge enjoyable to read. Everything else will fall into place if that is correct. We are the luckiest people in media because we have the audience that we do, and what we want more than anything is for that audience to feel how much we care. It's fun to care about something as much as we care about The Verge and our audience, that's been the secret to our success for nearly 11 years now.
This project has been in the works for two years and was bought into by many people at the company. I was chased down the most absurd possible rabbit holes by our designers trying to figure out what the future ofBlogging should look like. The product managers were Zahra Ladak, Tara Kalmanson, Marie Connelly, and Phil Hwang. The new comments system was built by the Coral team.
Duet is a new platform created by our engineering team that will allow us to experiment with publishing in the future. We couldn't have done this without our amazing engineering team. Our support and team spent a lot of time making sure everything worked. Make your vertical embeddings behave. C'mon now!
William was working through all of the ideas with me. The art team spent a lot of time making new visuals.
The editorial strategy for Storystream was developed by a group of people. David was going to post to the feed within hours of seeing the new design. Our project manager Kara Verlaney was the one who got us over the finish line to start.
Helen is a ferocious advocate for our team, our work, and our vision for the future of the site.
It is a huge investment to build a new product and I am grateful for the belief and support of the executive leadership of the company.
One of the first prototypes of our new newsfeed was made by my friend, and former colleague, Dieter Bohn. My man: it arrived.
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