Options for customizing a medium publication homepage

All the stuff you can do with logos, color schemes, background images, layout, etc.

The main hero + background

Small, medium, or large

Small, just with the logo and background color

Medium, with a logo and background image

Large, with logo, background image, and background color

Set focal point of a background image

Background Color + Background Image

Here’s a png image over background color 0052CC.

Logo, title, or both

If it’s just the logo, then the logo is bigger.

If it’s the logo + title + background image, then the background image may be automatically darkened a little to increase contrast.

Note that this’ll create contrast between the darkened background image and the non-darkened navigation, which may be an issue if you prefer the background image and navigation to blend into each other.

Left aligned or centered

Only an option in Large. Otherwise, it’s always left aligned in Small and Medium.

left aligned, also with the background image focal point manually shifted

Color: Subtle or Bold

Subtle will apply the color hex code to highlights, follow button, recommend button and author name.

Bold will also apply the color to the background of the homepage main hero area, and the top of stories in the publication.

Layout

More to come here, but there are a lot of ways to lay out featured stories, list stories, sort by recency vs popularity vs manual selection, etc.

Featured image of a story

When you publish, you can select which image is the featured image on the homepage. So, I can make this image below featured even though it’s at the bottom of the post.