Welcome to our new look. We are delighted to present you our redesign and walk the memory strip …
First, the change is strange – like when you cut your hair drastically and don’t recognize the person in the mirror. But hopefully this updated look will make the site feel fresher and more hospitable, and also help new readers explore the evergreen posts in the archive. We hope the design will feel as familiar and comfortable as the old site. “It seems to me that my living room has been remodeled,” said a reader named Jennifer.
When we decided to redesign the site, we pinched ourselves for the job RoAndCo, an amazing creative studio owned by a woman based in Manhattan. They immediately understood our goals and designed new elements, including a custom logo, color scheme, and typography system.
Then we worked with Man, the geniuses who developed the background of our site (it’s huge and complicated!). Above are Rachael (co-founder and director of accounts) and Michael (co-founder and technology director), who are the most beautiful two based in the state.
Want to see what the Jo Cup has looked like over the past 14 years? He has changed so much! Here is the timeline:
When I decided to play with blogging in 2007, my younger brother posted the name of the blog and called it the “Cup of Jo” at random. My career has been in magazines, but I thought it would be fun to mess around at night and on the weekends. (Also, I just broke up with my longtime boyfriend and I needed attention to eat chips on the sofa and send him a message from my flip phone.)
Over the next few years, the Cup of Jo grew faster than I expected and I realized I could make it my day job. I left my editorial role at Glamor to focus on the Full-Time Cup of Jo. But to be honest, the transition felt like a big career risk. I was worried that blogging would not become a valued path in the media world and that I would spend time experimenting and later have to start over in magazines.
Fortunately, the site has grown, as has my family – up to this point, Alex and I had two little boys. In 2013, we did a redesign with a wonderful design agency Apartment one. (I like how they removed the bubble in the header a bit and added new colors to the entire page.) And I also hired my first teammate in 2014: beautiful Caroline!!
Six years ago, in 2015, we did major redesign. Apartment one created a new look as well as a robust archive categorization system. I finally bought the domain cupofjo.com (a guy from Texas was sitting on it and waiting for me to buy it – we negotiated for years), and we also moved the entire website from blogspot to WordPress.
A few years later, I updated the photo above right, since Toby was officially no longer a baby. This is all!
That brings us to today, when we are launching our latest redesign. We have been longing for a fresh look / feel for several years. We wanted the Cup of Jo to feel more current and robust. We hoped to add more entry points to past posts, so people could more easily explore long-standing evergreen content (including Japanese parenting,, secrets of marriage, i remodeling houses). We also wanted the page to reflect our team and not have my photos on the home page (which looked like a personal blog).
We hope you enjoy your sightseeing and we are really grateful that you are here. Thank you so much for reading. xoxo
(Photo by Stephen Morris / Stocksy.)
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