Meet Medium 1.0: A New Storytelling Experience

The goal of Medium is to make it very simple to write and present a beautiful story without having to be a hardcore hacker or programmer. Medium then built its blogging platform in order to help people easily share these stories and ideas, starting with great writers to ensure a high quality of content. After several months of testing and making tweaks, it then opened the doors so anyone could publish stuff on the site.

Now Medium is launching a new set of big improvements called Medium 1.0 saying:

With 1.0, we’ve redesigned the reading and writing experience to make your stories look better and have more impact. We’ve also changed how collections work to enable curation and improve discoverability.

Stories

medium 1.0
Medium has made enhancements to the overall typography, spacing and responsiveness of the site design to make stories look good on all devices. Also it has added more visual prowess to creating stories by allowing for wide cover images.

Users can can now include full-bleed images inline, or add text on top of them to create different moods and experiences.

The site also has a Beautiful Stories collection to let you see examples of what’s now possible.

Collections

Previously, collections were either “invite-only” or “open” (where anyone could publish to them) where collection creators could remove stories that they didn’t feel fit in their collection, yet only after the fact. Now in Medium 1.0, all collections entries must be approved first by the creator who Medium calls “editors.” This gives curators more quality control without having to constantly keep tabs on their collections.

medium collections

After you publish a story, you can submit it to one or more relevant collections for approval.

Medium also said this about the new update:

We think these changes will provide a powerful ecosystem that helps all those who want to discover and share stories and ideas.

We’re calling this release Medium 1.0 because we feel it represents a major milestone for the product. It has all the core components to be the simple-but-powerful idea distribution system we set out to build. But, by definition, 1.0 means this is the beginning. We’re just getting started.

 
Do you use Medium yet? Feel free to share any awesome stories or collections below!

Daniel Zeevi

By Daniel Zeevi

Daniel is a social network architect, web developer, infographic designer, writer, speaker and founder of DashBurst. Full-time futurist and part-time content curator, always on the hunt for disruptive new technology, creative art and web humor.