Welcome to the all-new Animated Views!

While we’ve overhauled the site three times previously in our history, the last major revision was way back in 2009! Nine years might as well be forever in internet-time! We’ve known for awhile that we were starting to look a little dated. So for several years we’ve discussed and debated our fourth iteration. As you may or may not know, this website is a labor of love by several animation fans just like you. Which means we don’t make money off of it and it gets done in our free time. Finding the time when we can all get together to completely redesign the website has been hard. But with our 15th anniversary taking place next month, we really wanted to get this place spruced up with a new coat of paint — looking and working as good as possible for our loyal readers.

So what’s new? Obviously a new logo and new layout! We’ve cleaned the design up a bit to make it a little less busy so that the content takes center stage. (I’ve been comparing it to a more magazine-y look!) We’ve made the text larger and more readable, and punched up the image sizes. And maybe most importantly, viewing the site on a phone is no longer going to require you to strain your eyes! Yes, mobile users get a completely redesigned theme made specifically for smaller screens rather than just seeing the desktop site shrunk down.

As I mentioned earlier, we don’t have the luxury of being able to run this site full time, so there have been a few compromises. We didn’t do everything we wanted to do in the update. But we also didn’t want to make you wait until we were completely done to get to use it, because who knows when that would have been! So for the next several months we will be doing several things you should be aware of: we’ll continue tweaking the new design as we use it and learn what works and doesn’t work; we’ll be bringing back features from the older version of the site that we haven’t finished yet; and we’ll start adding new features we’ve come up with but haven’t been able to work on until the revamp was done.

Thank you so much for bearing with us over the past year as we’ve worked on this project. We’re reinvigorated by this new look and can’t wait to make this site even better with new content that I honestly think is some of the best original animation writing on the web! We really hope you like this overhaul of Animated Views, and we’d love to hear your thoughts, questions, comments, and even complaints (because I can guarantee there are going to be some things we’ve missed!) over in our forum!