Humor, How-Tutorial, Informative
Woah, Medium, You Put on New Clothes Today!
Useful tips for designing your profile page and figuring out what topics you’ve been distributed in.
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Medium donned its New-Year’s-Eve-best before Halloween and didn’t give writers a heads-up to go shopping for our new outfits!
This How-Tutorial is designed to help you find just the right outfit — ahem — design for your new profile page. It’s also designed to help non-techy people like me. I sincerely hope it helps you.
If you’ve been on the platform for a while, you know writing on Medium is like riding wild horses — unpredictable, and you may get bucked around a lot. There’s a lot of surprises, and the most successful writers brush themselves off and pivot with the best of them.
Medium is innovative and loves to evolve and change while taking its readers and writers along for the ride.
This is all well and good, but it can be a little discombobulating, especially for us writers who are not intuitive tech geeks and designers.
Kudos to all the intuitive tech geeks and designers on the platform.
Here are some tips for getting started with this new platform design for those of you who are confounded, dumbfounded, annoyed, and flibberdygibbeted.
First things first
You probably noticed that Medium’s platform completely changed in its aesthetics sometime during October 14, 2020 (in the United States).
What changed?
- Logo
- Page design
- Profile design
- Personalized URL option
Let's stick with these four topics for now. If you’re curious, like I was, about the logic behind the new logo — which I feel very undecided about, personally, check out this 3 Minute Read explanation from Medium’s design team.
Logo
Okay. These three dots are supposed to be ellipses. They make more sense to me when they’re in motion. Still, I feel better knowing what the heck the explanation is. What do you think after reading this?
The symbol, like our illustration style, is inspired by language and typography. It is born from the ellipses: a punctuation mark that represents an unfinished or impending thought, an idea to come, what’s next. This is, again, what happens on Medium — there’s always a new idea, always more to the story. — 3 Min Read
Page Design
You can see the new platform front page design in the front image of this article. Besides white space, not a lot has changed. Navigation is a little different. Here are a few tips:
- Click on your profile circle to go to your profile. The View Profile option in Settings is gone. You must click your profile on the homepage and then click it again in the dropdown to get to your Profile View.
- Click the ellipses logo to get back to the front page.
- Click on someone else’s profile circle to go directly to their Profile Page.
- There is now an endless scroll feature for all of your stories. I am ecstatic I created a Table of Contents early on in my Medium journey. I did this by creating a story and then copying and pasting all my links into categories. You can click on my hyperlink to see what that looks like. I try to update every one-two weeks.
- You can pin up to 3 stories to the top of your feed. Click the 3 dots at the bottom right-hand corner and click the “Pin” option to have your story appear at the top of your feed. The newest pin you make will appear at the very top. Keep this in mind when pinning multiple stories.
- Share your story on social media, either scroll to the bottom of it, click the arrow option, or click the arrow option at the bottom of your story preview. This will allow you to share on social media. I have mine set to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. There’s also a copy link option.
- To mute an author or publication, go to Settings and scroll to Manage Blocked Users. You can block authors from their page where the 3 dots are by clicking Mute this author, and you can block publications from the 3 dots on the publication page and clicking Mute this publication.
Profile
To change your profile design, go to the three dots setting in the upper-righthand corner, and click the Design option.
Here’s my non-designer opinion design on the color options. I wouldn’t say I like reading text against colored backgrounds in the same way I don’t particularly appreciate reading bold print as a text body. It hurts my eyes!
If you’re not a designer, I suggest you find a designer friend to help you or go easy on the design options.
Today, I played around with my profile design and adjusted a few things. Before you click Design and get startled by the gobbledy jobbledy writing, know that’s it’s only so you can see the design aesthetic. It has nothing to do with your content. When you click each option, you’ll see the font change over where the gobbledy jobbledy writing is. Same with color and so on.
No changes you make are final until you click Publish. So, don’t fret about making mistakes.
- Colors. On the left side menu, click the dropdown arrow, and you’ll get an option for accent and background colors. I chose a light blue for my accent color, thinking it would be neat to match my Age of Empathy publication. I set the background color to white. You can create additional hex color codes here.
- Fonts. Medium has made this easy for non-designers and probably frustrating for designers. I appreciate that there are not many differentiation options, as I believe this will keep the platform more fluid from one writer to the next. Your choices are for Titles, Details, and Body. Access these by clicking on the Fonts dropdown menu. Serif 1, Serif 2, and Sans Serif-1 are your choices. Play around with these and like at the gobbledy jobbledy writing to see what you like.
- Header. When you click the down arrow by Header, you’re going to get a lot of options. One step at a time, Young Grasshopper. It’s not as overwhelming as it looks.
- 1. Layout. Choose left-aligned or horizontal.
- 2. Size. Choose the small or large text. You have fewer design options if you choose the small text.
- 3. Choose Solid or Gradient. I chose Gradient for the image I added to display correctly. I then chose the lightest Gradient. Be sure not to click Reset Color. The change will be saved when you click Publish at the end.
By the way, my profile header image is a photograph of me outside of my high school in 1995 or 1996 at the young age of 17. I’ll change this eventually. I love the photo and for now, I thought Why not?
4. Underneath your Background Color choice is Story Header BG (Background) option. This is the solid color that appears on your story header when clicking into your story. The hex is all 0s on my design page currently, and the header is black. Update — I was experimenting with color headings and changed this to gray after publishing.
5. If you chose Large text, you have additional options. The next option is to add an image to your header. I chose my ala Sinead O’Connor photo for this. Click Image and drag your image or upload one.
6. Underneath Image is a rather vague looking Image Position option with arrows going all willy nilly. Click the arrows. See what happens. The middle one worked for me. This will be saved when you click Publish.
7. The next section is called Name. This is where you can import your Text logo or visual logo. I tried this with a photo of holiday lights to see how easy it was to do. It didn't look terrific, but it was easy. If you have a logo, it’s worth considering adding it to your profile page for more personalized branding.
Add logo
We recommend that each side of the logo be at least 400 pixels wide, and have a transparent background. We support JPG, PNG, and GIF files.
You can also add your logo from a link if you have access to your logo that way. You then choose your logo to display in S, M, or L — small, medium, or large. Click around to see what you like. Decide whether or not you want your logo to appear on your story header. If you do, make sure the arrow is checked.
8. Choose Sidebar or Header. From what I can tell, Header allows your bio information to appear while Sidebar does not.
9. A word on Bio Color. Choose the color you want, and your text color and the Medium logo will change to that color. *Do not click color reset* unless you want to try a new color.
Happy with your design?
Or, like me, did you say, “Screw it! I’m going to this party, whether I’m best dressed or not.”?
If you’re ready, hit Publish and then click Publish one more time.
Voila! Signed, sealed, delivered to your adoring readers.
Let’s get this party started! Dress in jeans and a t-shirt, a suit and tie, or a ballgown. We’re all unique. After all, “nothing compares to you.” — Sinead O’Connor
Final Design Page Tip
There is a Home and Story button at the top of the Design page with icons for a computer, iPad or similar, and phone. Select Home or Story and toggle between each icon to see what your design will look like in each space.
Personalize your URL
Go to Settings. Scroll down to the URL. If you wish to change your URL name, you may do so here.
Important: Think about where you’ve placed your Medium URL. Twitter? Facebook? Instagram? Upwork? Fivver? Clippings.me? LinkedIn? Medium has dropped the @ symbol in our URLs. Go and change your URL to match your new URL on all these sites. Do this ASAP to keep your site professional with no broken links.
Update: It has come to my attention; not everyone has this option in Settings on 10/14. This leads me to speculate that Medium is releasing these options in batches, possibly not overwhelming the site. Keep on the lookout for this new option to appear.
While we’re demystifying things, check out this back-end coding hack for finding your distribution topics by Rita Atlas. If I can do it, I have faith you can probably do it, too.
When you are looking for information on Medium updates, I recommend Ev William’s blog, Evhead. Ev is the founder of Medium and often answers questions there. 3 Min Read by Medium is another good resource to follow.
Did This How-Tutorial Help You?
Please leave a comment to let us know what you think of the new design. And, please share this article with anyone who needs a helping hand. Thank you!
Question for You
Now, I have a question for you. Hopefully, I can edit in your answer and give you credit. Recently, It has become a huge PITA to caption any image on the platform in the caption text box. If you’ve had this problem, you know what I’m talking about. Please help.
