Getting started with Medium

Some first reactions to the UI

Well, here I go, testing out Medium as a writing tool. I love that it is so clean, and that it reminds me of iA’s Writer. It’s all about forming your ideas, not about the formatting. Content over style. Like html instead of CSS. I’m finding this really refreshing actually — as a designer I think a lot about style but Medium is allowing me to focus on just forming thoughts.

New paragraph. And it’s nicely spaced out from the last one too. I also like how the text formatting tools only appear when you have text highlighted. You don’t need these tools before you need them, if you know what I mean, and to hide them away until that point really helps you focus on the writing itself. Medium is so far taking a few leaves out of Writer’s book. I’m feeling that the two products are giving us a glimpse of a new gold standard of how to compose and edit text.

Just have to say that I really like how Medium allows you to add an image between paragraphs. It’s a great solution to an issue that has made me cringe in the past. The old solution was to add an image into a text box, where the image was spaced out inconsistently and could also be deleted along with text if you highlighted it by mistake. I’ve always thought that images didn’t belong in text boxes. So the way Medium allows you to add an image just feels far more natural, and looks way better too. And space for a caption to the side of the image? Yes please.

Oh, and that the whole thing is responsive is just great. But it would have to be, right? There’s just no point in doing anything else these days. Unless you’re making an app, and that’s another kettle of fish entirely.