Blog-ish

Trying out Medium’s new look and feel, currently in beta testing (though you should be able to see it here, while reading this). There are a number of interesting elements, but perhaps most interesting is that most of them are superficial. That’s not meant in a negative way, but a literal one. Most of the changes (at least for now) are to the way content is presented.

But I think that may end up more important that it may appear at first. For example, one of the reasons why I feel this site has gotten a bit more formal over time (thus requiring the need for another, less formal site) was because of the look and feel. To be clear, part of that was my own doing, but another part of it was Medium’s scaffolding. I didn’t want to write a quick, short post because it wouldn’t look right alongside all the other content I had written.

With a move back to a feed-like structure, that concern goes away somewhat (though it presents other, different challenges, of course). Not only that, but it also makes you not want to use a massive image as the first thing on the page, unlike in the previous iteration. Again, that should be conducive to quicker, smaller posts.

Old v. New. Jarring, yes. But not in bad ways — content will adapt.

Of course, Medium has tried this before — a move toward “bloggy Medium” and it didn’t really take hold. But that was more predicated around the content creation window and less the content presentation window. Here, the editor looks the same (still fantastically spartan and simple), at least for now.

Anyway, just some quick thoughts as I try out the new format. We’ll see over time what works and what doesn’t.