A New Remarkist Logo!! Watch Parties, Maisel, Judy Blume and Best Fandoms Ever!
Showers of content for the Watch Party Issue in April
Hey! You’ve made it here to our April 2023 rmrk*st cover reveal and table of contents! We have nothing but April Showers of fannish content headed your way in the month ahead–no umbrella needed! ☂️
We also have an exciting new Remarkist design rebrand launching this month, and we’re ready to unveil some designs that we’re sure you’re going to love. Those in a hurry can jump down to the bottom of this article to peep 👀 our new logo and upcoming brand style! Or you can check out the final versions of the ones we didn’t go with.
If you missed our content last month, let’s hit the pause ⏸ button and catch you up! March was a big month for major TV franchises. Most notably, we were thrilled about the new (and final) Ted Lasso season. We took a look at how Ted Lasso–an inspirational character who exemplifies charming, hilarious, and effective leadership skills–stacks up against our favorite anti heroes in fiction. We were stoked about the highly anticipated drop of the limited series, Daisy Jones & the Six, based on the book 📒 of the same name, and took a close look at the journey of the story of this fictional band from book to screen. Speaking of music, we highlighted some of our favorite community Jukebox Jam sessions; the playlists created in those events live on our Spotify page. Jukebox Jams are music listening parties 🎧 that Remarkists host based on themes of their choice. For more playlists created by our community, follow our Spotify profile!
We weren’t just excited about TV this past month, though we did want to make sure that you’re watching these incredible streaming German-language shows. On the film end of the entertainment spectrum, we put together some fun obscure facts to wow others with at your next Scream themed trivia night in honor of the release of Scream VI. And we couldn’t let the film release based on arguably the most important role playing game of all time go unnoticed; we HAD to celebrate the release of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
As part of our ongoing official Remarkist watch party Slate, which includes Abbott Elementary, Schitt’s Creek, Dawson’s Creek and Star Wars, last month we highlighted the first two Memento Insights from a fan fiction series written by our Star Wars watch party hosts. Take a read of all the Memento Insights we dropped last month, and of course, stay tuned for more Memento Insights in April! Speaking of April….
Looking ahead to April: The Watch Party Issue!
The Watch Party Issue will cover fandom with an eye toward the watch party experience. The Remarkist app is celebrating two years in existence (!!!) in April 2023. We know, we can’t believe it either! The platform started with a very simple idea: a place to gather virtually, as if we are all on the same couch in the same living room, gathered around the same TV, to simultaneously watch and discuss a beloved show with other fans “together.” Our very first series watch was of the entirety of Gilmore Girls starting in April 2021. The Remarkist app has come so far since those early days, with Mementos and KRNL earning! But the watch party is our thing. Our members have scheduled literally hundreds of watch parties in tons of different storyworlds, and our members have perfected the watch party experience from hosting to attending.
In celebration of the watch party, we will concentrate on offering readers tips and best practices for hosting your own watch party–not just on our app. We’ll explore the relationship between watch parties and social media, and how that relationship has evolved over the last decade. We are looking forward to the release of the final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a show we have watched in its entirety together at Remarkist (a watch of the new season is already scheduled on our app!) And we’ll take a look at how fans of a groundbreaking book, Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, are poised for inter-generational watch parties of the new movie coming out in April.
Watch parties are just the beginning, of course. At Remarkist, we’ve always valued events that supplement the watch party: games 🎲, gab sessions 🗣, and more. As part of our Official Slate, we plan to introduce the Schitt’s Creek themed Tournament of Wigs, a bracket-style competition that will let YOU decide the Wackiest Wig in Moira’s collection! Similar to the Tournament of Threads we held last year based on David’s epic sweaters, we can’t wait to add this wig madness to our slate watch party of the sixth and final season of Schitt’s Creek!
We hope you’ll follow us on Instagram and Tumblr for more fan content, and tag us in your fandom art for a possible repost on our weekly Fan Art Fridays on our IG story! Remarkist is about highlighting fan creativity in all forms, and we love Fridays because we get to spotlight some amazing artists!
Check out the Table of Contents below; we’ll update this list throughout the month!
April Showers? Showers of fandom content, that is! Here’s what’s coming down next month:
Memento Insight : The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
By @Nancy (
)
How Judy Blume’s Movie Adaptation Honors 50 Years of Fans.
By
Memento Insight: Trouble in the Bay
By @mary (
)Memento Insight: Fleeing Danger with Rez
By @mej (
)The 15 Greatest Devoted Fandoms of All Time, Ranked
By
Memento Insight: Unexpected Help
By @ron (
)Memento Insight: No Safety Here
By @elle (
)
Our New Brand Redesign
And as we mentioned, this month will also see an exciting new Remarkist brand redesign!
We had a lot of fun over the past few weeks working on this new brand strategy, and we explored a lot of different paths. It led us to four awesome options we just couldn’t decide between. So we asked our community on Discord to help guide us a bit. We showed folks there the first version of each that we came up with weeks ago. We mostly wanted to get a sense for where the community’s heart is. Here were the four thematic options. Again, these aren’t the actual logos. They’re just how we began sketching out ideas for possible design themes.
Remarkist Folio
Remarkist Arcade
Remarkist Whimsy
Remarkist Exotic
So… yes, the winner of those polls ended up being Remarkist Whimsy… however, after going back and forth on it…
Our team decided to instead go with… Remarkist Arcade!
Don’t get us wrong, we love our final brand book for Whimsy… but darn it, call us old skool, we just couldn’t get over how fun and digital this Arcade design turned out. It allows us to incorporate our entire color palette and we feel like it represents the Remarkist Community so well—a colorful group of pixels, flickering and glitching away!
Gosh, we hope you love it as much as we do! If you don’t, there’s still time for us to take a different approach with one of our other three finals below.
We have always considered the Remarkist ecosystem to be a fandom playground, and we believe that an 80s style arcade is the perfect analogy for the kinds of fandom games we want to bring to this platform.
This new design will also inform our entire brand, and over the next few weeks you’ll see a quirky 8-bit style replacing everything in our ecosystem. For example, our official Remarkist Icons have all been updated to this new style. Check it out:
And hosts of our current Slate can expect some cool new upgrades to the Remarkified Avatars we created for them! Oh yes!
But what if we just aren’t feeling this new direction?
We realize this new brand style might not be for everyone. And some of you might even be a little disappointed that your favorite theme wasn’t the one we went with. While we hope the community can proudly get behind this new style, we do have the benefit of four other fully fleshed out options we can pivot to if we ultimately realize this wasn’t the right choice. And yes, we are ready to hear your honest opinion on this and will be doing more polls soon.
If you’d like to take a look at the final designs for Folio, Whimsy, and Exotic, including the Remarkist Icon variations we did for each and their adjusted Remarkified Avatars, you can browse our full design PDF here. It also includes a few doozies that never made it past version 1. We won’t consider any of those, but some of them are pretty weird.
