In just over a week, the first half of 2019 will be over. Time does fly when you are having fun!
Since landing our investment and moving to New York in December of last year, we’ve executed much of what we wanted our first six-month roadmap as a business, with full-time employees, to look like.
Coincidentally, the last piece of that roadmap is arguably the most important. When we started the year, the focus has always been about improving the product.
That process started with hiring Jen Richard to come run social media and help us develop original social content for the first time ever.
We followed up on Jen’s hire by adding Joe Londergan to activate our brand relationships. A product and its partnerships are only as good as the people who execute them.
The most recent additions of Ian Thomas and Michael McCarthy were aimed at taking our editorial coverage to the next level. They’ve been here less than a month and we have seen our work sourced everywhere from Awful Announcing and The Big Lead to Yahoo, Mobile Marketer and MSN. We couldn’t have asked for a better start to their time with us.
Today, we are excited to unveil the final piece of that roadmap. I’m super thankful for all of the time that people like Alyson Warshaw, Robert Diaz and Ana Dorta-Duque put into what you see in front of you today. It was a true group effort.
FOS 3.0 is here and we hope you enjoy it!
The Logo
When we first set out to redesign the logo, we reached out to many of our followers, readers and fans to get their feedback on what resonated most with them and what they found themselves calling us more often than not.
The answers were pretty much one-sided. “FOS”
With that in mind, we wanted to make sure that “FOS” became what we lead with going forward. We aren’t getting rid of Front Office Sports by any stretch, but in most things from social content to the new logo, “FOS” will be what is front and center.
With anything we do, there is always some sort of intention behind it. Eventually, we hope that everyone who knows us as Front Office Sports, will also know us as FOS.
Like any person or brand most people care about, the closer people are to something and the more they feel invested in it, the more it feels natural to call it by something that feels less corporate and more familiar.
The Colors
With the colors, the emphasis will continue to be on black and white as our primary one-two punch, but with the new design, we are adding in blue as a secondary color.
We have dabbled with secondary colors on different occasions, with one of them even being a blue that is similar to this one.
For us, the three colors are indicative of what we want the brand of FOS to stand for.
Black: Value
White: Crisp and clean
Blue: Trust
If our goal is to one day become the leading brand in the space, it starts with these three pillars. If we can execute against what we have laid out above, we believe we can build something truly special.
The Site
As you navigate the site, you will see something that we really built with you, our readers, in mind.
What quickly becomes apparent is that the content is allowed to shine through. During the design process, the end goal was to make certain that we were giving our most valuable asset its due.
We look at it this way – if you went to a Michelin Star restaurant for amazing food and the food was presented on a plate that was dirty or distracted from the food, the experience wouldn’t be as amazing.
We view content in the same way. The main thing should always be the main thing.
We look forward to your feedback and thoughts. We’ve spent countless hours testing, refining and trying to break the site in 100 different ways, but we know we probably can’t find it all. If you find something that feels off or isn’t working quite right, let us know.
While this is the icing on the cake for our first six months, we have so much more planned for you in quarter three and beyond. There will be events with an emphasis on wellness, new podcasts, new content series, new faces (a Head of Sales and a Newsletter Writer), maybe a few new awards, but as always, there will be the same tone, quality, and energy you have hopefully come to know, enjoy, and engage with over the last several years.
So, if you are someone who wants to work with us, a brand who wants to do something different or just a reader who wants to say hello, drop us a note!
Here’s to many more good times and hopefully no more redesigns!
– The FOS Squad (Adam, Russ, Jen, Joe, Ian and Michael)
