Found photograph of two unknown people observing something equally unknown, circa 1930


Good morning and welcome, wherever you are, to the second half of 2014.

And welcome to the New Design Observer.

Ten years ago, when we launched Design Observer, we vowed to cast a wider net around design in the hope that the ensuing conversation would include a bigger, broader audience, reflecting concerns and opinions that veered from ours, to challenge us to reconsider design theory as well as practice all over the world. 
We remain, as ever, deeply committed to thinking about and reacting to the visual world. Design, writ large  — as both a process and a product, a set of formal conceits and a platform for social engagement — remains for us at the epicenter of it all.
With this relaunch, we renew our promise to becoming more timely. More dynamic. More critical and daring. More democratic in our reach. And more committed to international coverage. On this subject, we hope you will join us in welcoming three new European correspondents: Véronique Vienne in Paris, Adrian Shaughnessy in London and Erik Spiekermann in Berlin. We hope to add contributors in Asia, Africa and Australia by early 2015. 

We renew our commitment, also, to the ways we think about design. Gone are the channels that formerly siloed our conversations: in their place, we've gathered our archive into easily searchable topics. We're introducing a more spirited, daily set of posts reflecting the more arguably porous boundaries that separate such things as media, design and urbanism. (Places will launch their own redesign this fall: for now they're still reachable here via our navigation and masthead.) We've included dates at the top of each article page to make it easy to locate and return to stories of interest. With a homepage link to our Twitter feed and easy access to our social media, we invite you to share and distribute our content as you like. And we'll be grouping job postings categorically to make finding them easier and more actionable.

Perhaps most importantly, we are pleased to introduce with this redesign a new social platform that encourages our readers to share, interact and instigate new conversations. We invite you all to register, fill out your profile pages, and think of the new Design Observer as we do: now more than ever, a critically engaged destination for dialogue, debate, disagreement, celebration, altercation, imagination — and more. 

It's the same old site. But it's a brand new conversation. We hope you'll think so, too.