The project page is the heart and soul of Kickstarter. It's where creators share their project ideas and backers go to see what they have in mind. In the last 30 days, close to 60% of the pageviews on Kickstarter have been to project pages. Project pages are a big deal.

When we were designing the first versions of Kickstarter, the project page was where we started. We endlessly debated how big the stats should be, how prominent the pitch video should be, what elements deserved to be higher on the page, how many columns the page should have, how comments, backers, and updates should relate to the project page, and much more. It was a long, long process.

In the last three years we've made some incremental changes (here's the original project page, and here's the project page we just replaced). But recently we decided to step back and challenge many of our original assumptions.

For months, we tried new ways of thinking about the page, but there were always trade-offs that we didn't like. Time and again we came back to the same structure we've always had. And while it might've been fun to unveil something completely new and radical, we gained confidence that we got a lot of things right the first time around. 

Today we're excited to launch a refreshed project page. The change went live across Kickstarter this morning. You can see a snapshot of it here:

So what has changed?

• Creator information is easier to find. Creator details are now prominently displayed closer to the top of the page. 
• Location and category are easier to find. Now isolated on the top right so they compete less with other info.
• Short description of project added. The short description has always been on project widgets, the homepage, and other pages but never on the project page itself. It's the quickest way to get a sense of what the project's about in the creator's own words.
• Launch date and funding end date added. Next to the short description are the launch date and the date when funding will end.
• Larger video. We made the entire left column larger, so now videos are bigger! 
• Design tweaks. We centered the title and creator name (more of a cinematic feel), made it more obvious when a project is successfully funded, adjusted fonts and spacing, and made lots of other touch-ups to make the page more cohesive.

To see the new design, just go to any project page. We hope you like the update!

Every week, we round up some of the stories about projects that made it into the press. We're happy to see them out there in the real world, and excited to share their progress with you! Read on.

Ron Cassie of Baltimore Magazine wrote about the Druid Hill Park Passport project, which aims to create a guide of activities and experiences within the park: "Launched by Friends of Druid Hill Park member Janet Felston — founding director of the successful Baltimore Green Map project — the Druid Hill passport program, if successful, will contain 16 pages of nature, exercise, history and cultural activities to help visitors become more familiar with the 745-acre park."

Sarah Morrison of Columbia Journalism Review featured a couple outstanding publishing projects currently funding on the site. The first is fiction project The Enthusiast: A Novel of Josh Fruhlinger, which will use funds raised to "bridge some of the gaps between self-publishing and the traditional model, paying for an editor, a designer, and upfront book costs. The rest will be used as a sort of advance, allowing Fruhlinger to turn down freelance gigs and dedicate as much time as possible to writing his novel." The second is Local: A Quarterly of People and Places, which "for its first issue, the focus is on Jersey Shore. No, not that Jersey Shore. This one is in Pennsylvania, home of infamous bootleggers, an old pajama factory, an alternate Declaration of Independence, and a historical society that counts among its collection a crown made out of human hair."Gareth Branwyn of Make Magazine And that magic word, Kickstarter, was on everybody’s lips. People told me that the project I was looking at was either Kickstarter funded, or was about to be. People are doing small on-demand prototypes, taking them to shows like Comic-Con, then drumming up support for a Kickstarter run. One impressive example I saw of this model of getting work published was at Armand Balthazar’s booth.

Carol Motsinger of the Asheville Citizen-Times explored the success of local project creators, including the public performance theater installation, Asheville Rites and Jake Bible's illustrated novella, Stark: “'Kickstarter has exposed my work to a whole new group of readers and fans, and the response I’ve gotten has been incredible,' he said. 'It is like the artistic patronage of old, but on a small, personal scale. Just outstanding.'”

Joshua Phillipp of the Epoch Times spotlighted the incredibly fun technology project called Bicycle Astronomy, which sets out to build an ultra-lightweight and compact telescope that can easily be carried on a cargo bicycle: "Yet just as dreams end with the blaring of an alarm clock, so too is that night sky being lost to light pollution. And it’s because of this that Doug Reilly, an amateur astronomer based in Geneva, New York, believes that astronomy can be one of the greatest tools of social awareness. He hopes to bring this about by inspiring a sense of wonder, and is bringing this about by creating Bicycle Astronomy and building a new type of bicycle and a new type of telescope to make it possible."