Medium (2020)Copied

Medium, founded in 2012, had gathered 170 million readers. Founder Ev Williams had announced a shift towards dialogue between readers and writers, a more intentional and relational network of ideas, and the company wanted a brand that could express that and flex. Collins worked with Medium for about a year, It's Nice That and The Brand Identity reported.

Collins framed the context bluntly, describing an internet culture in a downward spiral of online discourse, with ad-fuelled clickbait on one side and echo chambers on the other. Medium's marketing lead said the old branding lacked flexibility and its collage illustrations were slow to make. A Collins designer told The Brand Identity the aim was evolution, not departure.

The heart of the system is an illustration style that uses typography as its building block, words arranged into images, which Collins called a blunt illustration system giving movement and depth to the written word. It cites 19th and 20th century concrete poetry and Guillaume Apollinaire's calligrammes as influences, prizing their simple, awkward, unfinished quality, and the style can extend into 3D and motion. Medium's marketing lead said the concept reminded her of what Medium fundamentally is for writers: a blank page. A new symbol of a circle and two progressively slimmer ellipses is based on the three-dot ellipsis, standing for the anticipation of ideas still to come, with simple geometry offsetting a more ornate, redrawn wordmark meant to stand prouder. A palette that had been only black and white gained colour.

The typographic illustrations are a smart answer for a platform that is, literally, words.

The ellipsis did not last. In October 2024 Medium's own design blog explained that the company had dropped the symbol and was using the wordmark alone, with a cropped version for square app icons. Staff had come to feel the abstracted punctuation signalled hesitancy and uncertainty, and the writer admitted that Medium's frequent logo changes had become a running joke. The wordmark, adapted from Grilli Type's GT Super, was judged an honest embrace of the human written word. It is a candid postmortem, and a reminder that a symbol needs a meaning people grasp without being told.

The symbol is the weak link. Three shrinking dots are clever as a concept and forgettable as a mark, and they read more like a loading indicator than an invitation. Still, giving a text platform an illustration language made of text is the kind of idea that should have been obvious and wasn't.