Every five years or so, Kate and I get the itch to redesign the Art of Manliness. I don’t fully know where it comes from. After eighteen years of running this site, our tastes change, our sense of what AoM is about changes, and at some point an old design stops fitting the idea we’ve got in our heads. So we update the design and branding to reflect those changes and what we see as AoM’s mission and place in the world.
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, we just launched the latest of these designs. Allow us to walk you through it, and share where AoM’s been, where it’s at, and where it’s going.
Where We’ve Been
When I launched AoM back in 2008, I built the site myself, using rudimentary, self-taught HTML, PHP, and Photoshop. At this time in the cultural zeitgeist, there was a sense that the skills of manhood were no longer being passed down from generation to generation, that the art of being a man was disappearing. AoM was founded to help address this and revive the lost art of manliness, and so the first design had a distinctly vintage vibe, with a parchment-colored background and two John L. Sullivans gracing the masthead. It was crude, but got the job done.
In 2013, we were generating enough revenue from the site that I could hire a designer to make it look more professional, adding a wood-paneled background and a gentleman to the masthead to denote the balance of refined and rugged attributes that define true manliness. It still had that vintage, masculine vibe that conjured up a bygone era worth recapturing.
Around 2018 or so, this old-timey design started to feel dated. The whole artisanal, heritage-brand, mustache-everything trend had worked its way through the culture and begun to feel cartoonish and stale. At the same time, the internet had exploded in size and the amount of content out there had reached firehose-esque proportions. Guys had plenty of information on how to be a man, but there was a lack of emphasis on actually implementing it. We wanted to put an emphasis on taking action and getting stuff done.
So in 2019, we stripped the site down, got more minimal, and built everything around a new tagline — Get Action — which I lifted from a journal entry the young Teddy Roosevelt once scrawled to himself. The look went ’70s, which matched my mood of desiring less navel gazing and more just being cool and doing stuff.
Where We Are
Well, last year, we got the itch to redecorate the site again.
It’s 2026. AoM turned eighteen this year. We wanted a design that reflected AoM in its mature “adulthood” — something that synthesized our past, present, and future.
We had never been entirely happy with our previous designs (hence their turnover) and wanted something that felt more classic and could go a longer distance with us. And we wanted something that really reflected what we’re all about.
The other thing we wanted the new design to do is to highlight the fact that over the past eighteen years, AoM has grown into more than just AoM. Other prongs have grown out of it.
There’s The Strenuous Life, which a lot of you have joined. It’s basically a scouting program for grown men — an online/offline structure for putting the things we talk about on AoM into practice.
And there’s Dying Breed, the Substack newsletter Kate and I started last year for the more personal, more philosophical pieces that don’t quite fit here on AoM.
Each of these three projects forward our overall mission: helping individuals practice timeless virtues through thought, word, and deed. Dying Breed is the thought; Art of Manliness is the word; Strenuous Life is the deed.
Taken together, it’s an ecosystem of projects we’ve taken to calling McKay Inc, and we wanted the redesign to tie all of them together into one cohesive umbrella and provide entry points to them here on AoM.
We worked with a studio called Mythic Proportions to nail these desires. They didn’t just revamp our branding; they dug into our history and the people and ideas that have inspired AoM over the years to figure out what we’re all about. Then they did an awesome job distilling our mission and helping us create something that feels new, while also getting us back to our roots. Costel Tudose then coded it; he was absolutely indefatigable in patiently executing every little adjustment we wanted.
We’re really happy with how the site turned out. It feels fun, and the internet could use some more personality. It also feels like coming home.
We brought back the wood paneling (view the site on a desktop/laptop for the full look). We brought back the parchment paper background. We brought back John L. Sullivan in his original Currier and Ives glory. And we kept the “Get Action” energy by animating him. If you click around the different categories, you’ll notice him in motion in different setups.
We’ve also updated the AoM logo. It harkens to old-school boxing gear. We think it looks pretty dang spiffy.
Our hope is that the design gives a nod to the past, both AoM’s and in general, while also looking fresh and modern. Because that’s what AoM is all about. It’s not a call to return to bygone eras, but to preserve what is good across time. We look back to move forward; we are committed to reviving and strengthening enduring principles. (Read more about our ethos on our About page.)
The new AoM website feels like the kind of classic design I’ve been reaching for for almost twenty years, and I think it will finally endure longer than five.
Where We’re Going, Or, Why Invest So Much in a Website in 2026???
Now, you might be asking why we’d pour this much into a website in this current moment of the digital age. “Blogging” is dead. No one visits websites anymore. Everyone is on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Websites are so 2010. People can just ask ChatGPT half of the content we publish and get an answer in three seconds.
Well, AoM’s ethos has always been philosophically contrarian. And maybe this is an extension of that contrarian impulse.
I know a lot of people don’t really surf the internet anymore. I get it. The world has changed. But I still like to surf the web. I still like to visit websites. I like the finitude of it. When you’re done reading the thing, you move on to something else without having more slop shoveled into your mind gullet via the stream.
I like the serendipity of websites, too. With ChatGPT, you’ve got to already know what you’re after. You’re not surprised with LLMs. But with websites, you might stumble upon something you didn’t even know you were looking for. You learn something you didn’t know you wanted to know.
I think there’s still a place on the internet for serendipity, surprise, and content that makes your brain feel good instead of gross.
I want AoM to feel like an oasis from the cacophony of the infinite feed. It’s a place you visit the way you’d visit your favorite coffee shop or a used bookstore that’s always been there. Somewhere you can sit down, relax, browse around, and walk out feeling a little better than when you came in.
Rather than being something you have to have a certain app or a question formulated to visit, I want AoM to be a place you can wander into on your browser of choice, poke around, and find something you didn’t know you needed, or get reminded of something you used to do, but stopped doing, but should maybe start doing again.
So stop by AoM whenever you want. We’ll have a chair, along with some conversation and refreshments, waiting for you.
While I have you here now, I want to say a big thank you to everyone who’s been here since the start. A lot of you found AoM back in 2008 and have basically grown up alongside me. Some of you have been reading AoM since high school and now have kids of your own. Thank you for the emails and the letters and the kind words over the years. Thank you for sharing a podcast episode or an article with a friend, or your dad, or your brother-in-law. Even in a world of algorithmically-driven virality, word of mouth is still the best way for things to spread. That word of mouth means everything to us. It’s the best compliment we can get.
We’re looking forward to this next chapter. As long as we’ve got things we want to write about, we’ll be keeping the lights on here at our little hangout off the world wide web’s beaten path. We’re going to keep on doing our thing, because we like doing our thing. Thanks for supporting this thing.
Get Some Free AoM Stickers!
To celebrate the launch of our redesign, we’re giving away a set of three stickers with our new AoM logo. To claim yours, all you have to do is subscribe to our free newsletter. We got a daily option or a weekly option. Whatever works for you.
After you sign up, you’ll get an email asking for your address. Just enter it and we’ll send the stickers to you (make sure to input your address correctly!) completely free of charge. The offer is open to both international and domestic readers. The stickers will take several weeks to get to you as it will take time for the McKay children (got to put those kids to work!) to stuff and label envelopes.
This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.
