Medium publications

Medium wanted to update its publications product to allow for more expression and visual diversity, enabling everyone from individual bloggers to professional publications to express themselves in a powerful and effective way.

The first step was to bring a new look and feel to some of our current in-house publications: Gen, Zora, OneZero, and Level. The old publication layout (seen below) used the same typefaces and allowed for a single accent color selection.

I designed a set of card types to create more visual variety for story previews on a publication home page. These included full-image card, half-image card, a quote card, and two different story list types:

In collaboration with the brand team, I expanded each publication’s color palette and font selections. The new color palettes included background colors, font colors, and accent colors. Here is Level’s color palette:

We also selected a set of up to three typefaces for each publication. These were used across all of the type components in the Medium design system. Here is GEN’s typographic system:

Finally, here are homepage layouts for GEN, OneZero, and Level that pull together all of these elements (card types, color palettes, fonts):