This was long overdue, and things look a little different around Techjaja today. Like a million lasers shining through your mind, pointing at the future.
Techjaja turns six this month, and no –we’ve not been acquired by any company, instead we’ve consolidated the Techjaja brand into a new company called Redmint Inc. We’re marking the occasion with several things inducing; a refined logo, a new design system that extends into video, audio, photography, new article pages and a homepage built on the next generation of our inbuilt platform. There is now a renewed editorial focus on how technology will change life in the future and lots of freebies coming your way as you celebrate with us this milestone. This is big — one of the biggest projects ever undertaken at Techjaja and our partners, in fact. And I think it’s incredible.
New Techjaja Logo
First, our new word-mark is a slight refinement — we’ve changed the fonts and adopted a more sharper palette, we’ve generally brought it forward so it renders better at small sizes across mobile platforms. We’ve also thrown out the old logo and today we unleash our new shield shaped Techjaja logo, it was not an easy pick especially with all the options presented to us but we had to go with simplicity and great aesthetics. We created a new system of treatments for our various sections on all the social platforms they live on. There are also updated logos for our mini categories like FusedUp and Ublog. But the big changes are our new design system and our new web platform.
Routes & Polaroid
Our new design system is internally known as Routes, and it’s built to scale from elements on a web page to motion graphics in videos to physical structures at events. It’s made to pop with bright colors and illumination in certain areas of the website; I think it looks like a fiery sci-fi dream. We’ve also updated our main typefaces, from Oswad and Muli to our new custom font we call Polaroid. Polaroid is based on the PF Square Sans Pro font— and has refinements that work better on small screens and improve our overall legibility while preserving the character of our brand.
The first place you’ll notice the new and improved Routes language is on the homepage and article pages, which are all built on the next generation of our internal Platform and design language. The challenge was to implement the new changes and make the site much, much faster: 15-30 percent faster in our early tests. And this new version of Techjaja is more than a just “A techblog” website: it’s designed at the core to make creating stories easier and to distribute them across every platform you can imagine.
Our pages are now 15-30 percent faster
We’ve also redesigned the header and hero areas of our homepage: on desktop the header images will change often. I’m ridiculously excited about the extra space we have now have on the homepage giving us more room for dynamic headers, more ad space and may be a tagline; we have grand plans for that space over time, and you’ll see us change it early and often in these first few weeks of the redesign. This is going to be so rad.
When we launched Techjaja in 2013, we relied heavily on poor-quality stock images, so we have been disguising them in ways you can’t notice on our hero top article picks to make everything look good. But we decided this year to invest heavily in photography, so now we’re pulling those gradients out to the borders and letting our images speak for themselves. The bright colors we’re known for are part of the new Routes design language, and you’ll see us integrate those ideas directly into our photography and video.
Speaking of video, Routes was designed with our video partners Moving Ads in mind —New YouTube and Facebook bumpers, lower thirds, and thumbnail treatments are already rolling out, and you’ll see many more riffs on depth, space, and illumination using Routes in our videos to come.
What else? After extensive user research, we learned that our homepage was tricky for some to navigate, and that everyone just wanted to see as many headlines as possible. So under the hero, you’ll find a reverse-chronological feed of stories. Our Routes platforms can intelligently eliminates duplicated stories on the homepage and this extends to other pages as well. But don’t worry: thanks to the extra space, big reports, editorials, and reviews will get pinned with a new bigger treatment so that you’ll know when there’s something major to read.
The Video link in the Navigation bar now takes you straight to our YouTube page (I would go there and subscribe now to win some goodies. More to come on this). But if you don’t want to go to the YouTube page directly, we have created a small new Video Hub at the the homepage (honestly this is still experimental and subjects to changes in the near future).
Mobile reloaded
Your reading experience on mobile is also about to get uniform, this way we’ve made Routes to extends to our mobile experience and also platforms like Google AMP. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Platform and is an initiative from Google to make sites on mobile load faster and since over 60% of our traffic is mobile traffic we have to adopt to the new trends and make the experience uniform with the main site. To clean house, we’ve thrown out of old AMP engine and our current look is now cohesive with the webpage style. Our pages there look as clean and bright as our web pages, and as those platforms extend their capabilities, we’ll be able to deliver more and more interesting features to audiences wherever they might be.
We’ve also updated our look on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more with new logos and Routes imagery.
The Merch Store
Today we also announce our upcoming Store. This is a place where our readers will be able to buy and also win Techjaja branded premium merchandise. As we prepare to launch this store, get ready to win some cool merch like power banks, branded t-shirts, shirts, hoodies, etc in all sizes and for both ladies and gents. We also have plans to have laptop stickers and more. All branded with our redesigned logo.
To win one of them tees, just subscribe or follow all our social media channels especially YouTube or head to our merch page for more details.
Finally, we’ve arranged some great content to kick off this new chapter of Techjaja and its this is going to be a whole week extravaganza of GeekWeek. And this is all just the first pass: we have tons more ideas knocking around but I’m not going to give it all away at once, you know?
If you see something broken or buggy, see a bad Ad, or have another comment or concern, we’re here for you: email editor@techjaja.com or tweet @techjaja.
