Looking behind a redesign

A special sneak preview for my very valued paid subscribers (thank you!)

After almost eight years, it’s time.

The Thoughtful Travel Podcast started life back when podcasts were still an unknown quantity to the majority of people; I’d tell people I ran a podcast and they’d look at me a little bewildered.

I was thrilled when my friend Brooke offered to help me launch it, and she did a lot of the initially tricky parts: setting up the tech side so it fed into Apple Podcasts and other apps (Spotify didn’t even have podcasts back then), helping me figure out intros and outros, making the cover art, even editing the sound, while I concentrated on interviewing guests and figuring out which bits of our conversations would go together. I’d been wanting to start a podcast for a while and I’m still not sure if it would ever have got off the ground without Brooke’s help.

The podcast artwork, of course, is pretty important - it’s what listeners recognise in their long lists of podcast episodes whichever app they use. I’m good with words but really not a visual person, so I didn’t give Brooke much useful guidance on this, but she came through with a bunch of ideas which we refined down to the image with an Icelandic mountain - the one that has served the podcast well for all these years.