We’re trying out a new “beta” redesign here at Cult of Mac by the genius graphic designer Rob Beschizza, who is also a Wired News contributo.
The site may be slow for a few days and there may be glitches. Please us know if there’s any problems in the comments below. Please also leave your general feedback.
– Graphics are not final; big files might make for longer download
times or poor performance on slow machines.
– Beware general oddness; there’s some rough, invalid markup, etc.
– Transparent PNGs will look messed up on IE6. Upgrade! But IE6
detection is coming.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander is an expert on:
Apple and Apple history
Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and Apple leadership
Apple community
iPhone and iOS
iPad and iPadOS
Mac and macOS
Apple Watch and watchOS
Apple TV and tvOS
AirPods
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
41 responses to “Cult of Mac Redesign”
Ummmm…. really bad timing. You should do this next week or later.
Ooh, I like it!
Ooh, I like it!
Quick tip – just follow the process here for PNG rendering in IE5 + 6:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/b…
This is the same technique Apple.com uses in the iPhone Gallery (which also uses PNGs and works fine in IE).
I get a doubled copyright notice at the bottom of the page. But other than that I like it.
And (not to double post, but I just noticed it), the bottom banner ad is offset to the right. I’m running Safari 3.0b, btw.
I find that when I try to use the RSS feature within Safari it doesn’t work saying that the page can’t be displayed, This may be that you aren’t using RSS or don’t have it setup, but if you do, and it should work, it’s not… Just wanted to pass it along… Love the site!
Brian
Nice.
Beautiful design! By the way… Are your books going to be translated into spanish any time?
Big fan of the new design, great job so far.
Obviously didn’t design it to a mainstream resolution. View the site at 1024×768.
Woody,
It should be fine at that res, but I do want to tighten it in a bit. I’ll be tweaking and editing a lot in the coming days to work out browser-specific bugs – the main layout should just fit in a 1024x window, and once done, there’ll be space to spare.
re-work… not very attractive…
I like it, nice & readable.
But I preferred the old logo (on Wired) ;-)
The new layout is terrible. Poor colors make the site seem dull and uninteresting. Low contrast between text and background color make it hard to read. Header image is WAY too large consuming almost a good 1/3 of the screen for most popular resolutions. In sum: redesign or let’s go back to the original layout! Please! Thank you!
Ugly!!!! Fire your designer (and hire me).
Dougie, thanks for the link to Apple’s favored PNG transparency fix. I’d planned to use a different technique (server-side instead of javascript), but that will do just as well!
Howie, the colors will be tweaked, with an eye to a better contrast.
“*#&!)(#@,” anything in particular you don’t like?
Bde, thanks for pointing out the footer bugs :-)
Howie, the colors will be tweaked, with an eye to a better contrast.
“*#&!)(#@,” anything in particular you don’t like?
Bde, thanks for pointing out the footer bugs :-)
Looks great, i just came across the new desing, melikes!
I don’t think the problem is with the colors… mainly the gigantic size of you logo header and the layout.
great content as usual…