I’m Katie, and I lead the Publications team here at Medium. We’ve been busy working on some exciting improvements to our platform’s publishing tools, and I wanted to tell you a bit about what we’ve been up to.

Starting today, you’ll see a big facelift of your publication’s homepage. We’ve put a lot of work into improving the design of this page and increasing the functionality for readers. This was a huge team effort, and would not have been possible without @colombopablo’s beautiful designs, @valueof and @jean’s fearless engineering, @redindhi and @karenjaimes’ initial explorations.

The homepage is a way for the reader to first encounter your content — a vehicle for the intentionality of your publication. The content you produce is inherent to your identity, but our previous publication pages didn’t do a great job of elevating stories visually. The homepage overall felt very sparse, stories were buried beneath a big, bulky header, and the design was not optimized for content-first — especially on mobile.

We know there is a large emotional investment in building a publication, producing stories, reaching readers, so it’s natural to want control over how you present yourselves to the world. We’ve taken steps towards offering better tools to do so.

So, what’s new?

We’ve updated a few of the grid layouts to make it possible to have 1-up, 2-up, or 3-up layouts.

Example section with 1 large hero, and 3 stories under:

Example section with 1 large hero, and 2 stories under:

We’ve updated the list layout as well.

It’s narrower so the story content feels more attached to the image, and includes an “about box” with information about your publication.

We’ve consolidated the header so readers can get to your content faster.

A big part of this project was aimed at increasing the content density of your publication’s homepage, in addition to simplifying some pieces.

**One option we’ve removed is the background image on the header.**

Unfortunately this means that any white logos won’t display properly (see screenshot below). For any of you who had a background with a white logo, you’ll need to upload a dark version going forward.

We appreciate your patience and understanding as we continue to refine the product and push our platform forward.

You can now choose a “stream” display option for a section on your homepage.

It will look like a list, but the stream displays shorter posts fully inline and gives a better preview of the longer ones. See this post for more details.

To choose this option, go in to edit your publication layout and you’ll see a new option: stream.

This will result in a section where you can read right from your publication homepage, perfect for shorter pieces like news updates or quick links.

We’re excited about the potential of the stream for publications to spark more casual, short-form content and introduce a new rhythm and tone to your storytelling.

You can custom order the posts in a “featured” section.

Our team has been working to enable Publications to brand themselves better. A big part of this is having control over which stories get displayed on your homepage — and where.

If you go to edit the layout of your publication, you’ll see an extra dropdown for story placeholders in sections where the source is set to “Featured”:

If you click that dropdown, you will see a list of posts, and can choose which story to feature.

Here’s a quick video demo.