Room Escape Artist

In 2024, Room Escape Artist turns 10 years old… which is a strange sentence to write.

Back when we first built this site the two most common questions that we were asked were:

1. “What’s an escape room?”
2. “How are you going to have enough to write about?”

A decade later, we rarely have to answer either of them. These days the two most common questions that we’re asked are:

1. Who’s speaking at this year’s RECON? The lineup is shaping up wonderfully; get your tickets now!
2. Where’s your next Escape Immerse Explore Tour going? (The answer is New Mexico and it’s getting close to sold out already!)

To celebrate 10 years of Room Escape Artist, we have a number of things planned, but the very first is a redesign of this website.

This Redesign Has Been Long Overdue

For far too long, the design of Room Escape Artist as a functional website has been trash. As a professional UX designer, this has been a source of stress, embarrassment, and disappointment for me… but it has also been a problem that kept getting put on the back-burner.

Over the past few years, RECON and REPOD both grabbed a lot of my attention.

But more than effort, since the earliest days of REA, I committed to having the simplest, fastest, and stablest site infrastructure that I could possibly have. The rigidity of my approach came with some serious limitations. Those limitations have slowly lifted over time without changing the underlying technology, and now I have a lot more freedom.

So I’m fixing problems all over the place while making everything prettier.

What’s New?

Thus far – and I want to stress that over the coming months there will be many more improvements – there are tons of small changes around the site, but the biggest ones fall into improvements in two categories:

• Homepage
• Header

Homepage Improvements

Room Escape Artist started as a blog and maintained a blog aesthetic for far too long.

With our old design, a casual visitor would have no clue that the site contained roughly 3,000 individual blog posts.

We struggled to feature key content, and we have always had a hard time resurfacing old content that is still relevant.

The new homepage helps to communicate the size and variety of REA. Over the next few months, we will continue to iterate on the homepage and do a better job of surfacing interesting content, new and old.

Header Improvements

The search bar will forever be on top, no matter what device you’re using… and I am deeply sorry for how 💩 search has been on REA for the past couple of years.

Beyond the prominence of search, we have redesigned our header and navigation. There will be a lot of fiddling with this as we are acutely aware of the issues involving our featured images. These are growing pains with a new layout that our old images were never optimized for.

What Comes Next?

As mentioned, we’re going to continue to iterate on the changes that we have already made. When we finish the fine tuning on the current layout, we’re going to turn out attention to a few significant improvement projects. The two most important will be:

• Improving search functionality
• Upgrading our entire approach to Regional Recommendations Guides

REA 10

As we kick off our 10th year of operation, we are excited by what the future holds for the escape room and immersive gaming world.

• Season 7 of Reality Escape Pod is already in the works. It launches this spring.
• In 2024, we’ll be traveling to and reviewing some new and incredible escape room markets and revisiting some of our favorite places.
• The New Mexico Tour is going to be a blast.
• RECON Los Angeles is by far the most ambitious event that we have ever designed and I cannot wait for everyone to gather and experience it together.
• And we have so many more projects in the works to share knowledge and build this community that we love so much.

We’ve never been better organized or more focused.

10 years in, I think back on all of those people who snidely asked if we “would have enough to write about escape rooms” and smile.