The Crazy Truth about the Medium Logo Redesign
The Secret is Revealed! And It Could Be a Metaphor.
You’ve probably noticed that Medium has just redesigned its logo.
It used to be be a stylized M. Which stood for Medium.
Now it is three dots. Viewed sort of sideways. Like three dots in the process of going around a corner.
Your first thought on seeing the new logo might have been What?
Your second thought might have been Why??
What the three dots reminded me of was Damien Hirst’s dot paintings. Which I was pretty certain wasn’t what they were supposed to remind me of. But I didn’t care. Who really cares about logos?
Then I stumbled upon an article by Medium’s Marketing VP about the logo redesign. It took six minutes to read, and contained scads of information about why and how and by whom the logo was redesigned, but here’s the gist of it:
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.
