New dark theme

In the Northern Hemisphere, it's getting darker.

It's hard to believe, but two years have passed since my last newsletter update. During this time, I've primarily been working full-time for 3Blue1Brown as an artist and math illustrator. My time working for Grant was a huge opportunity and taught me a lot about publishing educational content online. In this post, I want to share some recently published changes to the website.

The biggest change is the new dark theme mode! It’s now the default theme for the site. Take a look and let me know what you think. Other changes include no more ads, content filters, and search improvements.

Dark theme: The site's theme will default to dark unless your operating system is set to a light theme. You can toggle between light and dark modes using the moon icon in the upper right corner of the site. This button replaces the previously ambiguous icon, which was linked to the "about" page. There are still some kinks to be ironed out regarding the theme, but on the whole, I'm happy with how it turned out.

Removed ads: While the site has been chugging along in the background for the past two years, I ran a couple of experiments for monetizing the site. Perhaps you've come across a small leaderboard ad on select pages of the site. This ad-slot gave me some data on whether the site could support my cost of living if I worked on it full-time. In short, the site doesn't generate enough traffic to support me without significantly increasing ads, which would compromise user experience. In the meantime, I have removed all ads on the site for a better user experience.

Improvements: I've added some content filters at the top of some sections that allow for content to be filtered into different categories or subjects. This seems to work well with the bite-size nature of the content on the site and I think it is here to stay. The search experience should be better too, especially for some symbol-related queries.

Lastly, while I don’t plan to work on the site full-time, I am very excited about future content. Working for 3Blue1Brown has given me a bunch of ideas and insights that I would like to apply to the project moving forward.

Best,

Kurt