I posted this internally to Medium employees November 18, 2013. See Hatching Inside Medium for more context.
Casual Content
Making small the right size for Medium
One of the next big things I want to figure out is how we design for “casual” content on Medium. By casual I mean things that are less weighty, less long, perhaps more visual. “Snacks” and “amuse-bouches” to counter balance the entrees and full meals in one’s information diet.
Enabling these types of posts is not counter to our goal of creating a space for thoughtful, meaningful content. I think it’s complimentary to it. Think of any serious magazine — it as the “front of book” nuggets between the same covers as the serious feature articles. A magazine of feature articles alone would be a drag. Also, it wouldn’t be very popular on the newsstand, which means the feature articles wouldn’t get read a lot.
Also, for what it’s worth, multiple sizes and shapes of content was always part of the Medium vision (see early template-based designs).
Short, lighter weight stuff is technically possible on Medium today, but these type of posts just don’t look or feel right. This is partially due to expectations and partially due to design. If we take care of the design, the expectations will take care of themselves.
I have some specific things in mind when I think about how we might design for “casualness.” Especially for mobile. This includes ideas like titles optional, a background on a whole post, and other notions like bigger fonts for short stuff. But all/none of these may be correct. Definitely some design efforts to be applied here at the appropriate time.
Mockup
For example, here is a very short post I wrote to test shorter things on Medium: your product is but one character in the play. It’s not a very good post. It was a throw-away idea. But that’s not because it’s short. And because it’s short, it doesn’t look right. How could it look better? Here’s a very rough mockup on how it might look if our designs were “responsive” to the content [full size image]:
All I’m doing here is two things:
- Getting rid of redundant information. When you can see the whole post on one screen, you don’t need two author blocks, publish dates, or even to mention the collection name at the top, when it’s at the bottom. (Side note: I also get rid of “1 minute read.” This is not redundant information per se, it’s just unecessary information. Also, inaccurate at this size.)
- Adjusting font sizes. The title is actually smaller in the second one, but the body copy is larger. This is somewhat unintuitive, but seems right: Big, feature articles have big headlines/headers. Small blurbs have small titles (or none at all, which should also be an option). What if our font sizes were responsive not just to screen size, but to content size?
This is by no means the right design. In fact, it’s not even up to date with changes we’ve already made. But it demonstrates how we might better enable casual content. I know if my post looked more like the mockup above, I’d be more enthused to write small things — which would actually mean I end up writing more long things.
