Medium Meta
So THAT’s The Kicker
An underused Medium formatting tool to make your articles look more professional
Have you noticed that some stories on Medium just look more professional than others? There’s something about them that makes them stand out from the crowd. They’re usually published in one of Medium’s big publications, but that’s not the only thing… visually, they’re just different.
What you’re thinking of is probably the kicker. In journalism, a kicker is defined as
a line of newspaper type set above a headline usually in a different typeface and intended to provoke interest in, editorialize about, or provide orientation for the matter in the copy heads [Merriam Webster].
Medium offers the ability to add a kicker to your article, and you probably didn’t even know it. This is what it looks like on a Medium story on my profile:
The red arrow in the image above is pointing to the kicker, an extra line of text above the title of my article, “I’m a Novelist Living Without an ‘Imagination’.” The story was published in Medium’s publication Human Parts and was included…
