Your stories have a new home

A unique Medium profile and address

Ritwik Dey
The Medium Blog
3 min readOct 14, 2020

--

Your Medium profile is where readers get to know more about you, to see the face behind the name, the mind behind the words. For writers, it’s a place to showcase ideas for the millions of curious eyes and hungry minds that flock to Medium each day. Your profile should be every bit as distinct as the stories you publish in it. But it isn’t. Today, we take the first step towards changing that.

My new Medium profile, straight out of the box

In an effort to empower individual creators, we’ve taken what we learned from developing expressive tools for publications and brought it to everyone’s Medium profile. You can now make your profile a true reflection of yourself in ways that you couldn’t before. This space becomes your blog, where you can develop your voice, build your audience, and create a personalized space for your ideas on the internet.

Customizable design

The new profile is simple, clean and opinionated. But the design editor lets you take it further, to express your personal style and brand. Play with combinations of fonts, colors, logos and sizes. Do as much or as little as you like, and look great no matter what.

Playing around in the design editor

Frictionless reading

A more immediate layout puts your content first, bringing readers right into your stories. And a newly designed story footer takes them seamlessly into more. Feature a story by simply pinning it to the top of your profile.

Short or long, your ideas have a home

Medium has always been a place where longer-form content can shine. Now, we’ve made the story editor more flexible so you have the freedom to use as many or as few words as you like. Posting a link, a quote, or a picture has a natural home on your profile, so you can choose the format that feels right.

Your own Medium URL

Every unique home deserves a unique address. So every new profile comes with its own Medium URL. We’ll prompt you the next time you publish a story.

Highlights, claps and responses

We’ve heard feedback that people often don’t expect to see story interactions like highlights, claps, and responses on their public profile since they weren’t explicitly published there. Your new profile is a space where you control what readers see. Highlights can now be found in your reading list, claps only appear on the story you’ve clapped for, and responses can be managed from your Stories page or from the responses panel in a story.

“I love the new layout, the customizability, and the clean look/feel of the new profile. It’s gorgeous and a place I’d be very proud to send anyone who was interested in my writing. I appreciate that the design editor was streamlined and easy to use, too, as I’m all thumbs when it comes to that sort of thing.”

— new profile user

Again, this is just the first step. There’s a lot we’re working on, like adding navigation to profiles and publications, or features that take advantage of the vast Medium network to better connect readers and writers. There’s so much coming, stay tuned.

Unlisted

--

--

Ritwik Dey
Ritwik Dey

Written by Ritwik Dey

Father, husband, heading up design at Sanity.io. Trying to do as much with as little as possible.