On behalf of The Rumpus, I’m excited to reveal our first major redesign since the magazine launched fourteen years ago in 2009.
With the support of 258 donors who contributed to our June fundraiser and a Capacity-Building Grant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), we were able to secure the funds needed to take on the serious project of modernizing the site.
Our goals for this redesign were to:
- Reorganize and modernize the site. We can now highlight and feature content from our various sections—comics, poetry, fiction, interviews, special/themed issues, our columns, and more!
- Enhance mobile viewing, as our original design was created primarily with desktop readers in mind.
- Vastly improve our ability to format poetry as the author intended.
- Publish original comics with faster loading artwork.
- Apply contemporary best coding practices to provide more admin and editorial tools for easier maintenance, future updates and releases, and improved accessibility.
- Allow readers and contributors to browse our deep archives of over 5,000 contributors with improved search capabilities.
- Save us countless hours dealing with security, technical, and formatting issues.
- Most importantly, we want to offer our contributors a space where their work is presented well and clearly cared for.
As with any new space, I’m sure we’ll discover things we’d like to tweak or improve along the way. However, I hope you’ll see this as proof of our commitment to building a better Rumpus for our current and future contributors, while honoring the many great writers who put the magazine on the map.
We invite you to celebrate the new site with us
-Alyson Sinclair, Publisher, The Rumpus
SPECIAL THANKS TO: Developer and web designer Josh McCall who was extremely pro, thoughtful, and patient with a bunch of English majors; brand designer Alissa Minnick who refreshed our look; and everyone on The Rumpus team who tested the site pre-launch. I’d like share some extra appreciation for Editors Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn and Stephanie Trott for going through the early stages of planning. The redesign would not be possible without your many many hours of cleanup, reorganization, and troubleshooting.
