Welcome to the new Feministing!

Last year, you celebrated our tenth anniversary by making the Feministing Times Ten Kickstarter campaign successful, and the resulting redesign is here! 

With today’s relaunch, our design is cleaner, easier to navigate, and better reflects our hybrid identity as a journalistic publication and an activist space. We’ve taken aesthetic cues from protest culture, and we’ve better highlighted our badass collective of over a dozen contributors. Our crew — which is majority people of color and diverse in terms of gender, sexual orientation, class background, and geography — speaks to the experiences of a wide range of readers, including those who’ve historically been marginalized within the feminist movement. And we are especially psyched that the new design showcases that.

You’ll notice we’ve moved away from using the mudflap girl as our logo at the top of the site. We love Ms. Mudflap flipping the bird at the sexist beauty standard she represents, but we also think she’s a figure who doesn’t capture all that Feministing has become. We’re not getting rid of her completely, though — you’ll still see her at the top of some static pages and incorporated into logos for ongoing series.

We’ve made some changes to the community aspects of Feministing too. We’re using Disqus for comments moderation, which will allow us to bring back a commenting culture that’s constructive and compelling. Instead of creating a Feministing account to join the discussion, you’ll just have to login via Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or with a Disqus account. Our Community site is more integrated into Feministing, and we’re committed to continuing to use that space to elevate the work of a wide range of emerging feminist voices. Be sure to reacquaint yourself with our standards for comments and Community posts before diving in.

The new design is responsive and optimized for reading on both desktop and mobile devices. We are committed to accessibility here at Feministing, and the new mobile design makes our content much easier to read on the devices that an increasing number of our readers are using to access the site. It looks so good, in fact, we might even start writing our posts on our phones.

We’re very grateful to Studio Rodrigo for their hard work on the design, and particularly to designer Kate Proulx who translated our dreams into reality. We’d also like to thank our trusty developers at Exobi Interactive, Michella Rivera-Gravage and Jessica Yazbek, for implementing the new site and making it work. Exobi has made many important updates and fixes that will make the site more functional for everyone going forward.

The new look accompanies changes in how we’re working these days as well. Feministing started as a blog, but over the years we’ve expanded into a much bigger publication featuring a range of content by a large team of writers from across the feminist spectrum. This year, we’ve shifted toward a working model that gives our writers the time and support they need to create their best work. Our writers are now all columnists focused on writing weekly in-depth columns, while Executive Director of Editorial, Maya Dusenbery, and Editor Alexandra Brodsky provide editorial feedback and manage the daily coverage of the site.

And behind-the-scenes, we’ve been working hard to transform Feministing from an underfunded “labor of love” to a sustainable organization that can continue to center marginalized feminist voices and also pay them equitably. Our Kickstarter supporters, who made this redesign possible, have demonstrated that we have a community that’s down to support this work. We’re incredibly inspired by that. Executive Director of Development, Jos Truitt, and our kickass team are working to launch new fundraising efforts very soon as part of this relaunch — stay tuned for more.

This relaunch is only the beginning. As online feminism has gained influence over the last decade, Feministing has stayed ahead of the curve, remaining uniquely situated at the intersection of new media and feminist activism, producing bold, uncompromising content, achieving concrete real-world victories, and building an engaged community of young feminists. In the next phase of Feministing, we’ll continue to grow and expand our work, bringing in new voices, strengthening our activist capacity, and more.

For now, enjoy the new site. And a million thanks to each and every reader who donated to make it happen.