The new dirtyverse

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the new Dirtyverse! Today we are debuting our publishing platform as well as paid subscriptions. You can learn more about our redesign here. Dirt will continue to be inbox-first, but we hope dirt.fyi will become a daily destination for those that prefer the browser experience. We will send out a free dispatch 3x a week (Daily Dirt) and longform articles 2x a week (Weekly Dirt) that require a subscription to read in full. You, of course, can control which emails you receive. We are in the process of migrating our full archive (which will remain free) from Substack.

The stories we are launching with draw on themes that have long been part of the Dirt ethos: nostalgia for a smaller internet, the ephemerality of “vibes” and how they manifest on different networks, the infinite ways intellectual property can be adapted across platforms, visually-driven online subcultures, the collapse of “high” and “low” culture, and the imperfect politics of the emerging metaverse. All of our contributors have a unique perspective on belonging…

The redesign

Daisy Alioto takes you behind-the-scenes of Dirt’s collaboration with Fictive Kin.

Shortly after we connected with Fictive Kin (FK), we knew they were the right partner to build Dirt’s new platform. FK is a product studio based in Brooklyn. Their combined team of designers and engineers has worked with brands ranging from Radiolab and National Geographic to Sweetgreen and Kickstarter. Most importantly, to our baby blogger hearts, FK led the redesign of Rookie Magazine in 2015. They were also making a name for themselves in web3, having incubated an NFT tournament and “social experiment” called Peacefall.

When we thought about what a website should be, our mood board was varied. It included, in no particular order: old covers of Mondo 2000, vintage university pennants, the Dover Street Market logo, French watches with Breguet numerals, books with marbled endpapers and beloved editorial and ecommerce websites like Food52 and Sight Unseen.

We knew what we didn’t want. We didn’t want the lazy minimalism that characterized the last wave of direct-to-consumer millennial branding, and we definitely didn’t want the aesthetic that had emerged to counteract that–digital brutalism dialed up to 10, with clashing fonts nested into homepages like a bunch of squawking, baby birds.

We also wanted to avoid the design cliché’s of web3. Magenta as shorthand for metaverse. Gradients as shorthand for The Future. Emojis as shorthand for “pay attention to this Twitter thread!!!” It had been a long Hot Regression Summer, and baby we wanted something fresh.

We worked with two incredibly talented female artists for our annual subscription and Founder Pass designs. You can read more about the artwork of Amber Vittoria and Monica Rizzolli in catalog essays authored by Terry Nguyen. We’ve also made it easy to onboard your friends to Dirt through gift subscriptions. We’ve assembled a list of frequently asked questions here.

New to Dirt? Start here…

Dirt Classics