When I redesigned Sidebar last year my main goal was to shake things up. The result was a pretty radical new design, which introduced cards & thumbnails, and deliberately hid away most of the content.

Sidebar’s 2016 redesign

I still think this was an interesting pattern (and I’m curious to see if it’ll be picked up anywhere else), but the downside is that it was a fairly rigid format.

So for this latest design, I decided to go back to basics and return to a more standard single-column design:

Bigger & Better Typography

I also wanted to give more importance to typography (still using the gorgeous GT Eesti as my main typeface, but with the addition of Merriweather for body copy), which shows through in the oversized headings for dates and page titles:

Speaking of typography, the new version now sports short descriptions for each link. Descriptions have been one of the most-requested features for a while now, and I’m hoping they make it easier to decide what to read or not.

Search is still here as well. You can search by keyword, category, or date:

The Sidebar Job Board

Another big improvement is the addition of a job board. There are admittedly already a lot of design job boards out there, but finding a designer can still be a challenge.

I’m hoping that the fact that Sidebar reaches designers directly in their inbox can make a difference!

Powered by Vulcan

On the technical side, Sidebar is still powered by Vulcan, my own open-source framework now running on GraphQL. I’m obviously biased, but thanks to Vulcan working on this redesign was very smooth.

I was able to easily add the job board and a whole new sponsored link submission flow, which left me more time to focus on designing the front-end layer.

In fact I turned that sponsored link flow into a series of tutorial videos, so you too can know how Sidebar is made (and use the payments module I developed for the occasion to add Stripe to your app).

Till Next Year

This is not a ground-breaking new design by any means, but it should be good enough to last me at least until next year. In the meantime, thanks for being a Sidebar subscriber (and if you’re not, then go sign up!).