Medium is a great publishing platform. Make it even greater by using these hacks, tricks and tips that we’ve collected since using it for our blog.
By Vojtech Svec
Make tweeting quotes a breeze!
When you select some text in a Medium article, it conveniently offers you to comment, highlight or tweet the selection. But you still need to think about what to tweet, select it and go through a process, which might deter some people. To allow your readers to share memorable quotes or other worthy pieces of content even more quickly and easily (and drive more traffic to your articles), you can put links next to them, that are pre-set to contain the quoted text (and more!).
Learn the easiest way to help readers tweet about your article! — Tweet this!
To make shareable content like this, go to Twitter’s button builder page. Start by filling in your data, including the shared text, URLs, links, hashtags, etc. Right click the generated button and copy its URL (not the HTML code) and use it for a link in your Medium post, like we did in the example above.
You can do the same for other social networks, use images as buttons for multiple services, get analytics for your link, and do even more tricks, but we’ll cover all that in more detail in a separate article.
Upload multiple images at once to fit them in a row
When the upload file dialog opens, you can select multiple files to have them neatly organised in one row like this:
The rows can be two or three images — four or more will get split into multiple lines of two or three (still a nice, quick way to build a gallery). The order of the images is, sadly, dictated by the filenames — if you need a specific order, rename your files based on the order you’d like them in. And keep in mind that once they are uploaded, you can’t change the images — if you delete one out of three, it will just put the remaining two as single row images.
Use invisible images for right aligning text
You can insert a small white or transparent image and set the position to either one of the left alignments to push text on the same line to the right.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
— John Doe, Unknown ltd.
The most obvious use of this is the nice way to quote an author. This is not a perfect solution by far, as the image will create a fixed offset, but in some cases, it can be useful. The two different image positions have different offsets, so always experiment with both to see which one fits better.
Use colour or texture backgrounds to create simple sections
If you want to create more vertical rhythm or separate some content out more than headings, paragraphs, and horizontal rules allow, you can use images to create sections. Images with either just a colour or some simple, soft texture work best, a very simple or blurry photo should work nicely as well.
Several things to keep in mind:
- Medium will automatically add a dark grey overlay and switch to light colour fonts, so you’re pretty much stuck with dark background sections. Still, alternating those with the default white background is a powerful tool for improving vertical flow.
- Think about the content when making the background image, as it’s height (or, more precisely, it’s aspect ratio) will dictate the height of the whole section — or make the images tailored to the content.
- The sizes for images to be used for sections are 1200 x 960 px minimum
and 1400 x 1120 px recommended, as per Medium’s image use article. - You can’t use the default horizontal rules — instead of inserting the rule, it will end the section and start a new one in the default style. You can still make horizontal rules and dividers by using images — learn how in the next tip.
Use images for custom horizontal rules or section separators
You can upload an image and set it’s size and position to create more appealing and / or meaningful separators between blocks of text, categories, or sections. It’s also the only way to have horizontal rules in dark background sections.
Vanilla — What Medium uses normally. Subtle, works well in a lot of situations, but it is the default.
Symbol — You can add icons to carry some meaning (like showing categories, replacing headings or list bullets, …) or just look nice, your logo to strengthen the brand feel, or just a nice custom line. Has some default vertical padding.
Paragraph-width — Same placement as before, but a bigger image (has to be at least the width of the Medium text container). Can be used nicely to separate a block of text with different meanings. You could possibly utilise the caption, but the placement for this width is weird… Some default padding.
Extra-width — Very prominent separator. Great for splitting the whole post into sections, perfect for chapters. Much better placement of the caption for small comments, like footnotes. More default padding.
Full-width — The most prominent visual separator you can make with this approach. Really splits the post apart — good for sectioning long posts with a lot of items, that don’t really connect to each other. Also very good placement of the caption. Loads of default padding.
Some of these have a minimum size requirement — see Medium’s image use article.
The presented examples and use cases are just a taste. Play with these, explore different ways to use them, and share your amazing inventions or other tricks you have up your sleeve!
Vojta is our go-to guy for product design. Besides making our Medium blog look awesome, he’s currently working on the upcoming sld.gs relaunch and Sleighdogs swag — anyone interested in a Sleighdogs robe? Follow @VojtechSvec for more on design, internet insights, and his signature wordplay.
Keep up with the Sleighdogs and the entire pack @Sleighdogs.
