My fellow anime fans, good evening.

It really seems like I’m doing these a bit more often as of late. But, to be honest, there’s just been a lot going on that I’ve wanted to discuss! Today, we finally took the plunge, and went with a full redesign for Anime Herald. This has been the product of numerous long, sleepless nights, and more than a hundred hours of preparation and setup, in addition to the normal Anime Herald workflow.

In fact, the last time we’ve put this much effort into a redesign of this nature was in 2013, when we first launched the layout that you’ve come to know and love today. You read that right: it’s been five whole years that we were rocking that classic white slate style. We had some minor modernizations a couple of years ago, but those were miniscule compared to what we’re doing today.

Now, this wasn’t the cleanest launch, I’ll admit. First, our “coming soon” page got stuck… and then our CDN decided to die out on us. But, anyway, with that out-of-the-way, we’re ready to tackle the next five, or six, or however many years ahead!

We’ll be tweaking and adding a few more features along the next few weeks, so if you don’t see something, let us know and we’ll look into adding it.

But anyway! Before I go any further, I’d like to take a moment to talk about what you see when you first log in. Or, rather, what you don’t see. Previously, our site had a pretty strict hierarchy: Featured items and news were there first when you entered, and bookended all content from top to bottom.

This is no longer the case. As we’re de-emphasizing the importance of the daily news feed, we’re pushing that stuff away from the top of the page. Instead, we’ll be highlighting our long form pieces. reviews, interviews, and op-ends are now at the forefront, followed by our latest Herald Anime Club and Nerdy Talk entries. News takes its spot at the bottom – it’ll always have a home, but it certainly won’t be as prominent going forward.

More important, though, is that our new design will allow us to do, well… fun things with content – bring these bigger articles to life in ways that we hadn’t been able to even fathom previously. Expect us to start showing what we can do on this end with our next major articles.

We’re excited to be able to share this with you, and hope that you enjoy the next phase as we journey into the future.