At long last, we have a new website! Those of you who’ve followed Booooooom since the early days will recognize the image above—it was the header of the site for several years (bonus points if you remember what the top of the site looked like before that). What you’re looking at represents more than 8 months of work by a team of people. Take some time to look around—a lot has changed, and there’s more changes on the way! I’m excited to share all the details with you guys, but before I get to the what, I’ll start with the why.

Since the very beginning there have been two sides to Booooooom: A curated side, where I decide what content to publish, and a community side, where our readers decide. This community side usually takes the form of monthly open calls for submissions or collaborative art projects, and readers are encouraged to submit work regardless of their skill-level. As the editor, it’s been an interesting challenge to be both selective and inclusive, and although it might be easier to just do one or the other, I believe Booooooom’s unique energy has always been a balance of these two things. This is kinda where the site redesign started, with the realisation that the site had become unbalanced, and that more focus needed to be put on the community side.

So what changes did we make?

The biggest new feature we’ve added is the ability to log into Booooooom and become a member. This is especially relevant for anyone who wants their work featured on our site and is serious about pursuing a career in the arts. We are introducing a monthly membership that allows you to publish your own posts (with up to 8 images and a description) directly to the Submissions section of our site. Strong work published here will also be highlighted on our homepage as featured submissions, and all submitted work will be considered for future editorial. There will also be opportunities for constructive criticism and feedback. We want to help you improve your craft, connect you with other artists, and ultimately enable you to live doing what you love.

The new submission platform will also be an integral part of community projects, allowing you to instantly view your submission in a project gallery. Have a look at the Remake Project Gallery and the Little Drifters Project Gallery as examples.

As the membership evolves over the coming months, a portion of each membership fee will go towards creative grants that only members will be eligible to receive. Members will be able to pitch their ideas and the best ones will receive money to bring them to life. This way every member of the Booooooom community will be directly helping the other members.

In the future, we want to be commissioning emerging artists directly out of our member base (we’re kinda already doing it). As an agency, we’ve created work for brands like Ray Ban, WeTransfer, Red Bull, Herschel Supply, and Flexfit, and the best people we hired were all readers of our site. There are no membership fees yet, so if you wanna try sharing your work, head over here to submit.

Of course if membership and the community side doesn’t interest you, the archive of 11,000+ articles we’ve published over the past 9 years isn’t going anywhere, and the new site design gives us a lot more options for presenting long-form and short-form content. So now interviews can look like this, and artist spotlights can look like this, and we can give you extra bits of info in the form of footnotes like this, and well, you get the idea. We have lots of amazing content on the way, hopefully you’ll have fun getting lost in it. We’ll be fine tuning what’s here before we add anything new, so please let us know if you come across any bugs!

Thank you all for your continued support of Booooooom! Huge thanks to Levi (my partner on Booooooom) and the talented team at Palms for working tirelessly to bring this site to life — and to my sister Kimi (pretty much every time you see the word Staff on a post, she put it together).

— Jeff Hamada, Editor-In-Chief