Why Is a Designer Using Medium?!?
Use the tool that best achieves your goal
Q: Why is a designer posting things to Medium? Shouldn’t you be, you know, designing your own blog?
A: That’s a great question. And probably one of our most-asked questions.
I’ll give you the short answer first: because I want to write.
Let me tell you a story about my mom, the seamstress. She spent all day making clothes. And she was, is!, very good at it. And every September, before school started, she would drive us to Sears and load us up with new clothes for school. All the while, complaining about the crappy craftsmanship. She could have made us clothes, but there was only so much time in the day, and she didn’t want to spend her off-hours doing the same thing she’d done at work. Her goal with her kids was to spend time with her kids. Her goal at work was to make clothes.
My goal when I write is to write.
And by using someone else’s system I am forced to work under their design decisions and focus on my goal: which is to write. More importantly, I’m not able to spend time doing things counter to my goal. In the past I’ve posted many things to many blogs which I’ve designed myself. And 50% of my time was generally spent tinkering with layout, type, color, etc. All of those things designers enjoy tinkering with. And I can somewhat do that on Medium to a limited degree. Thankfully, a very limited degree, or I would fiddle all day with it.
Also, Dear Design Student is a collaboration between a group of very opinionated people. And if one of us owned the design system I guarantee that person’s Slack channel would be full of requests for changes to the design system. And very opinionated people very seldom agree on something. So by using a pre-defined system, we’re able to skirt that problem completely.
But aren’t you afraid you don’t own where you’re publishing?
Good grief, this again. I post things on Medium because I want to write about something, and I want the thing I write to be understood by the people reading it. And seen by as many people as possible. That’s what Medium is designed for, by the way. To bring people to words. And they’re very good at bringing people to words. If you want people to read what you wrote, you bring it to where the people are. Martin Luther didn’t post his Ninety-Five Theses to his blog, he nailed it to a church door. Where it would be seen by the audience he was trying to reach.
As a designer, it’s my job to make sure my work reaches its intended audience. And right now, the best chance of doing that is on Medium. Tomorrow it may be somewhere else, and I’ll move this whole thing to wherever that is.
Is blogging dead?
No. Also, who the fuck cares? The promise of the web is that you could post your words. No middleman. No one between you and the audience. That promise is still there. Blogs are one of the many vehicles for delivering on that promise, and a very fine one. This is another. Sometimes you wanna drive your own car so you can pick the music. Sometimes you wanna take the bus and meet new freaks.
As a designer, you use the best tools at hand to achieve your goal.
Mike Monteiro is a nice guy or a total asshole depending on your opinion. He is also the Design Director at Mule Design. And the author of Design Is a Job and You’re My Favorite Client.
