Gumroad - Exploring Gumroad's New Look

Over the weekend, we launched a redesigned version of Gumroad's homepage. This is the page's first major redesign since 2016. Our CEO, Sahil, said of the new design:

"I’m excited to share our vision of a possible future, where everyone gets to earn a living doing what they love."

The page features top creators, a spectacular space theme, and links to the latest posts and updates by Gumroad. I am going spend another few hundred words trying to explain how wonderful it is, but you can just check it out for yourself at https://gumroad.com/.

Homepage: A History

The earliest archive.org snapshot of gumroad.com is from April 7, 2011. It looks a little something like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20110407095836/http://www.gumroad.com/

This homepage communicated one of Gumroad's core values: simplicity. At the time, Gumroad was a less capable service, with only a few basic features for listing products. In both design and copy, this homepage reflected that simplicity while communicating the entire value proposition in just 86 words.

By 2014, Gumroad had grown both as a product and as a company. The homepage changed often during that growth period, here is how it looked on March 01, 2014: https://web.archive.org/web/20140301011911/https://gumroad.com/

This page maintained a focus on the CTA and value proposition, but added social proof of various forms. It still used bold colors and illustrations, some of which we still use to this day (anyone recognize the piggy bank from weekly payout emails?)

The most recent complete homepage overhaul was in 2016. If you used Gumroad last week, you probably saw: https://web.archive.org/web/20161114070040/https://gumroad.com/

Fundamentally, it was the same design language with fancier illustrations, more varied social proof, a fun feature carousel, and a bit more copy. This homepage served us well for many years, but as we look to the future we wanted a public image that reflects our ambitions.

Now, in 2020, we have a new homepage, updated to our present design aesthetic, that communicates our past, our present, and our future.

Inspecting Elements

Let's take a look at three elements from the homepage.

New illustrations & Space theme

With illustrations by BoxBrown, the new homepage mixes extra sci-fi with our existing colorful aesthetic. Sahil took a leading role in implementing the new page, so he mixed in his love of space. "I love sci-fi," says Sahil, "But generally I like visualizing a future where everyone is a creator. I imagine that future is not bound to Earth."

This page takes a different approach to explaining the value proposition than the previous ones did. Rather than focusing on Gumroad's features, we focus on what those features can help you achieve. In 2020, Gumroad's offerings and e-commerce in general is much better understood than it was a decade ago, so we are able to focus less on the mechanics and more on the results. We highlight our features separately on gumroad.com/features.

Oh, yeah, and the homepage respects your system dark mode setting, because we're cool like that.

Creator Bubbles

Creators are the only past, present, and future of Gumroad. Rather than a few handpicked testimonials, we wanted to highlight a broader range of our most successful creators. The homepage features a randomized selection of recent top creators, showing their profile picture and their profile bio when you hover over each circle.

The hardest bit of implementing this was keeping the circles equidistant and preventing them from overlapping. The most exciting part of having it is wondering who will show up on the page next.

GMV Graph

Near the bottom of the page, we share a graph of our annual GMV (Gross Marketplace Volume). The creator economy has grown tremendously in the past few years and shows no signs of slowing down. The new homepage reflects our commitment to being the best place on the internet to be an active participant in the creator economy.

Thanks for joining us on today's guided tour of the Gumroad homepage, check it our for yourself at https://gumroad.com/

P.S. Our Head of Community, Randall Kanna, is running a five-day challenge to help you get started building your email list or take your existing list to the next level. Sign up, it's totally free!