Is Medium’s New Logo A Sign Of Bigger Problems?
By: Jim Woods
Tags: Marketing, Content Marketing, Medium, Writer, Writing

Is Medium’s New Logo A Sign Of Bigger Problems?

A quick look at what’s happened with Medium over the last week

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Medium has implemented a lot of changes over the last week. New personal profile designs, writers on the front page now (finally) have their names listed and a new logo was launched.

But what concerns me most is the new logo.

When I first saw the logo, I thought my webpage had an error and didn’t fully load.

Clearly, I’m not alone.

This logo is so bad it makes me question everything about Medium. It appears logic and common sense have gone out the window.

Why would I say something that extreme?

Because if your branding isn’t clear, you failed.

It appears Medium is just changing things to change them, and there is no clear vision. That’s really scary.

Say you share a self-published post with someone from Medium. It’s their very first time encountering the website. What do they see?

They see this.

Medium has no branding on the page other than the weird … logo. It makes a self-published post look like a blog with a free Wordpress theme.

Wordpress.org

Doesn’t that look pretty familiar? Just hide the side bar and they are almost identical.

These web pages are not unique. In fact, they are just BORING. It’s just plain vanilla ice cream in a rocky road world. More on this concept here.

And that’s a problem.

Is it possible I’m overreacting? Sure. I could be. But branding matters. End user experience matters.

Here’s the homepage if you’re not logged into an account.

Okay, that’s better. I guess that’s a spotlight made of words… maybe?

Here’s what a post in a post in a publication looks like for a first time reader.

I like the Write Stuff logo there, because that really helps the overall experience. But the funky … Medium logo really looks like an error. It looks like a mistake right there in the top corner.

This new change makes publications even more important than ever before. And there was already a serious publication problem on Medium, which I go into more detail about in the post below.

A Final Word

What concerns me most about the new logo is the disconnect with the end users. Medium is nothing without the writers. Medium will cease to exist without people having fresh content to read on the website.

Let me ask you a question. How do you feel being a writer on Medium? Do you feel like you are valued, or are you always playing catch up to the constant changes that don’t really seem to help you as a writer?

I love Medium, but I’m very concerned about Medium’s future.

As a writer, I’d love to see some real improvements, such as really customizing your homepage to see content that you want to see. Maybe having the ability to tip writers for a great post (because payment is not based on claps or engagement anymore). Using more than the bogus time-based metric for posts where anyone writing poetry or anything shorter is not immediately penalized.

Even tiered subscription levels could be good (instead of $5 per month you could pay $10 or $20 per month) where you are able to pay writers better while also supporting the growth of Medium.

As an end user and reader, I’d love for Medium to just have more clarity and stop making things more confusing.

It will be interesting to see how this all pans out in the future.