At the start of 2026, I put out a call to listeners and the Riverside podcasting community to help me decide on a refreshed podcast cover artwork design to suit the rebranded podcast – if you missed what that was all about, check out this blog post:
After a fair few redrafts, I have finally settled on this one:
Here’s Why…
- I was challenged to think about my core message and advised to make that the boldest thing on the tile. As per my last blog post, I’ve made my peace with the term “work-life balance”, which is essentially what the podcast is all about, so I emboldened that up and placed it right at the top.
- But I wanted to keep the “confessions” concept front and centre too. Many were not fans of thin, squiggly writing, so I used the boldest script I could find without losing the handwritten diary-writing effect.
- Explaining the podcast concept with a tag-line felt important to me an an unknown independent podcaster; some people fed back that they found this helpful – it explained what they could expect when they pressed play. But overwhelmingly the feedback was to remove this from the artwork cover as it’s better to keep it simple and clean. Instead, I pulled it the explainer tagline into the online description of the podcast. You can read it here.
- Finally, the photo! I agonised over this a while because I still find it cringe to put my photo out there. Plus, I like the work-life stick person image, which I was told worked too. So, I was very much leaning towards removing my photo all together. However, again and again I was told – and by people in the know – that having a photo is “scroll stopping”, satisfies listeners’ curiosity about who they’re listening to, and enhances engagement and connection. So I’ve kept it in.
And there we have it. Rebrand complete, just in time for recording to resume this week.
Thank you SO much to all those who shared their feedback. It all really made a difference.
Look out for Season 5, starting soon!
By the way, did you know that the Work-Life Balance Confessions Podcast has a new monthly newsletter, sharing some wisdom and insights from podcast interviews. The first edition came out in January and focussed on how sleep can be utilised in the pursuit of balance. Sign up here for future monthly newsletters to land directly in your inbox: www.a-fine-balance.com/podcast.