Well, I have something to admit. You may not be aware, and I certainly wasn’t, that in fact I’m a total liar! The screams of shock and horror flying at your screen right now are completely understandable but it’s time to be honest.
Basically last year, I posted an article about MANFACE turning 5 years old and that the site had started back in 2010. In fact, this is not true and I, as you, am finding this out for the first time very recently! It seems I’m a complete and total idiot.
So a little disclaimer before I get into the celebratory self back-patting. I use a tool called WayBack Machine. When you pop in your domain, it shows all the past iterations of your website over the years, mine showing it had started in 2010. Now, when I checked it again recently to get ready for turning 6, some older entries for 2009 suddenly appeared which made me think something was fishy.
What I had never known is that for 12 months prior to me starting, manface.co.uk was a domain already in use by someone else, who I’ve been unable to track down, who’d attempted to write a men’s fragrance blog and given up! I still stand by the fact that I came up with the name – he just had access to Minority Report-type equipment.
So yeah, long story short, MANFACE is 5 and I’m a moron. Plus I tell you something, it certainly feels like 60 years.
In celebration of this, you can hopefully see the new branding which is the result of working with an incredible branding designer and illustrator, Jose Gonzalez at RGMX. He’s done some incredible branding work over the years so please check him out – the two images below are his too!
In the past, all the logos and branding have been done by yours truly, but I finally wanted to throw it to someone else and see if they could come up with something new and exciting, and I think he really did.
Some of you may also know that I make websites, primarily for lovely people in the beauty and blogging sectors, and have done this through my other company Stocksbank (it was originally called Clickface, but a certain PR kept referring to it as Clitface so it was ultimately a no-go).
After all kinds of chats and SEO-wizardry, this has now all been brought into the fold of MANFACE under the name MANFACE Digital. I’m also very excited to currently be working on the total redesign of Zelens plus a few other great brands!
So 5 years on, things are really different. I’m definitely not the person I was when I started MANFACE or even a couple of years ago. I feel calmer, less certain that I know everything about everything, more understanding of other people’s opinions and ideas, more considered, a bit less mean, a little kinder and just a bit more bloody mellow.
When you live a good chunk of your life through a screen, it’s very easy to fall in love with the smell of your own bullshit and forget that even though I love what I do, we’re not curing developing world disease here.
So it’s amazing to have people around you who call things out for what they are – so to my incredible parents – you all know how much of an input Mother MANFACE has here and my step-dad remains a go-to guinneapig and business czar – to one of the kindest and thoughtful people in the world, my partner – Chris; Ross for his indispensable expertise and to 2 incredible people I cherish the opinions, experience and friendship of: Jane Cunningham (British Beauty Blogger) and Jason Waterworth, Director of UPPR… and yes I’m all teary now so go away!
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing – Stephen R. Covey
