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"As a writer, the biggest potential waste of your time is not typography chores, but Medium itself. Because in return for that snazzy design, Medium needs you to relinquish control of how your work gets to readers."
Amen. Finally, someone has put this simply. The issue here has nothing to do with type. The author does a pretty good job of pointing out why Medium's pandering to design is clearly B.S. — but most importantly it's a complete ruse. It's a distraction from the fact that they own you.
Edit: If you'd like to downvote my viewpoint, I'd appreciate that you offer some kind of insight into why.
It's a distraction from the fact that they own you.
No they don't.
They don't own the work you choose to publish through their platform in any way whatsoever. By publishing it there you give them permission to use it[1], but no ownership of it. They have absolutely no claim on you, your future work, your past work, or any benefit you might receive from publishing with them. You can delete a story after you've published it, and you can publish it unlisted so it won't appear in any listings or publications on their site.
If you believe that's the same as owning you then you have a very strange definition of "owning you".
[1] https://medium.com/policy/medium-terms-of-service-9db0094a1e...
It's a distraction from the fact that they own you.
1) Many people do not care to maintain a blog
2) Many people do not plan on writing regularly; maybe once every three months may even be a miracle, in which case a shared platform is preferable.
3) Writing on your own blog is like building your own restaurant in the desert instead of a strip mall, it will take a lot to get people to find it.
4) Sometimes you just want to share something, and you just do not feel like having your own blog is necessary for it.
5) Many who claim that Medium will own their content do not end up writing anything, hence their ideas, which could be truly beneficial to society, end up dying as a distant memory.
My favorite writing tool of all time is, without a question in my mind, LyX.
It manages to find the perfect balance of minimal barriers to productivity, absolute power when I need it, and seriously professional grade results. It's like writing with iAWriter or similar tools, except I still have some basic structural options in the interface, and the end result generated is downright professional grade.
I think the "WYSIWYM" approach that LyX takes on, combined with the power of LaTeX underneath and the powerful customization possibilities that brings, kinda makes it a silver bullet for a writer in my book.
Have you written any long documents or a book with LyX? Any recommendations on resources for learning LyX or LaTeX? There are a lot of Markdown-based publishing tools being promoted these days.
Back in my days in academia, I used LaTeX for math and physics. I liked that LaTeX separated out formatting of content from the display. It made it easier for me to focus on the getting the ideas and wording right and someone else worried about producing nice looking templates.
Since then, I have switched over to Markdown for most of writing. There are still ways to embed LaTeX when needed for equations, but without the added complexity of full LaTeX.
LaTeX is indeed fearsomely powerful but I think it depends on what type of document you are writing. Lots of math, complicated symbols, graphs etc? LaTeX.
Blogging? There are a approximately a billion choices, but lately I have been playing around with Scrivener. It is a little overkill for a blog entry, but it is one of the few programs to not treat a computer as just a typewritter with more fancy font, spellcheck and better correction - instead it allows your to sorta weave your story together, piece by piece.
I am writing a short stories book (as an amateur), I was looking for a better tool than Word (not that I can't write in it, just that I don't feel confortable in it). I followed your passionate comment and I am installing LyX right now, after getting assured that you can also use LyX to create a letter or a novel or a theatre play or film script.
Thanks for the comment
I'm not sure I could even list all the authoring tools I've used, which includes writing a few college papers in nroff. I'd mostly stuck with straight text and graduated to HTML (the lingua franca of the Web) in the late 1990s. I actually got stymied on Lyx with some of its insistence on specific structures for documents and fighting those.
In the past year or two I actually took out my copy of the Lion Book and sorted out what I'd been missing with LaTeX. I realized that a decent set of templates was much of the issue, and now have a basic book and article template that I use for most of my work. And while futzing with specifics of layout can keep you from a final output, it won't stop you from writing. And that's the key problem most of the time.
I've also been exploring Markdown (thanks to reddit, Ello, Diaspora, and numerous other sites which rely on it), and Pandoc, which is nowhere short of amazing and astounding.
More often than I care to admit I'll take content from a website and either reduce it to its HTML core or, with depressing frequency, straight ASCII text, add back some light Markdown, and present it as PDF for reading. Web design has gotten that freaking annoying.
On the Medium discussion -- I find the site pretty good, actually, and disagree with the arguments Butterick raises against its minimalism. Good design is light design, and Medium is among the most minimally re-styled sites I visit. Changes?
.highlightMenu { display: none; }
.metabar--affixed { position: static; }
.metabar--bottom { position: static; }
.notesMarker { display: none; }
.postContent { color: black; font-weight: normal; }
Mind that I don't publish on Medium (at least, not yet). Though I've considered it.
As for "typewriter habits", among the advantages of the typewriter -- as a composing interface -- is that it simplifies input. Tools such as LaTeX then perform the job of transforming typewriter input into typographic output. Most often with very minimal additional directives from the author. Tools such as Markdown reduce that still further.
Two spaces after a full stop? Absolutely. Why? Because in my typography it helps me to distinguish between stops following abbreviations and sentences. Which is a useful thing. Mr. Brown. The first stop terminates an abbreviation. The second an entire sentence. About the only of the conventions that I need to consciously apply is ``quotes'' around quoted passages, though search-and-replace of "straight quotes" is actually pretty easily accomplished with some regex magick. Markdown removes the need entirely.
The original computing vision, the Mother of All Demos, was philosophically against designing text in the ways of the obsolete print medium. The focus was on inventing a new way of writing information altogether. Instead of having paragraphs go one after another as required by print, have maps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map of the argument, wikis etc. If we focused on this more, we might have reached a new level of communication efficiency by now.
Here we are arguing if we should let authors stylize text. Does this restyling of text help communicate more efficiently? Typically no, a long wall of text just needs to be set in a readable style.
Even this choice of presentation was supposed to be the reader's, not the author's. I do not care one bit about links appearing in a ♢ weird new way. Links should appear the same way, everywhere on the web. http://motherfuckingwebsite.com just needed some padding, nice font rendering, line spacing and you'd get Medium.
To the reader, Medium promises consistency of presentation that the rest of the web does not. That problem should really have been solved on the browser's end, by a style that applied to all articles, chosen by the user from existing templates.
The style should serve a functional purpose to the reader, be slower or faster to read, reduce eyestrain, etc.
The web was supposed to be more extreme than frozen pizza, more like astronaut's food paste. Skeuomorphic pizza in any form distracts users from the real purpose.
As far as Medium controlling your content, if the web was smarter you could put it somewhere else and the links would magically work. Centralization is a technically simple way to exploit a dumb network and the network should be fixed.
Sidenote: at the bottom of the motherfuckingwebsite link is a link to a blogging tool called txti:
You just type some stuff into the text box, submit the form and you've got a web page:
It's remarkably similar to jottit, a tool built several years ago by the late Aaron Swartz:
Exact same thing: you type some text into a text box, submit the form and you've got a web page:
Surely this is a matter of personal taste / opinion -- I actually prefer when different sites have different designs. For example, I don't like RSS readers that put all content into the same format, and prefer ones that just link to the articles so I can read things in the context of the site's design (as the author wants it, not me).
And I think the diamonds next to the hyperlinks on this article is a neat design flourish (because it is still intuitive and usable... although admittedly most other designs that do away with the standard underlined text are a usability loss).
What is the point of inserting a "◊" before each link? It looks ridiculous and distracts from reading the article.
Because it's a web-based book? I've browsed about and haven't seen a clear explanation. (It took a while to figure out what the hell is going on at that site.)
Apparently he considers underlining a sin against typography [http://practicaltypography.com/underlining.html] as one of the "bad typewriter habits" [http://practicaltypography.com/typewriter-habits.html]. That might be why.
Which is funny, because one of his other rules is against abusing ALL CAPS [http://practicaltypography.com/all-caps.html]--which he does for internal links.
The site is also full of other absurd usability choices, like using the blank edges of the page for navigation [http://practicaltypography.com/how-to-use.html].
The author might know good typography for books, but has gone way overboard applying it to his website.
I think he's experimenting with linking to other documents. I did something similar as an experiment (http://www.conman.org/people/spc/writings/hypertext/fragment...) but ended up just sticking with the default underlines.
Medium's typography is simple and readable. I like reading things on Medium more than reading things on most blogs because nobody can mess it up. The focus is on the content. That's exactly what I want; I want to read and not be distracted.
The way this article is displayed, however, is not only distracting, but a perfect example of how dogma-like design choices can take away from the functionality and usability. I understand why the author doesn't believe underlines should be used to represent links, but the diamonds are the most distracting and confusing design I've seen online in a long time.
Medium could offer simple and readable blogs via an open source app and concurrently offer freemium hosting (e.g., the ghost.io and WordPress model).
I agree with the author's fundamental concerns about freedom.
I imagine some years in the future the same people heralding Medium will become its harshest critics. How many times does it take for people to be burned by proprietary apps/services before they stop using them? In the case of Medium, there are ample alternatives.The author is right that marketing Medium really is what Medium does best.
I think that's kind of the author's point, with Medium you are just consuming content. No distractions, no thought-provoking insights, no change in form, factor, or font to distract you from just consuming the article and hopefully clicking an ad afterwards.
What is writing? Is it getting all the words down before you forget your point? Or is it polishing and formatting your content to appeal to the readers? It's easy to throw the term around, brand your software for writers, the best writing tool, etc.
I can't say I agree 100% with either author. On the one hand, Wichary shows some 'gorgeous' LaserDisc snippet and lauds it as some return to the good old pre-typewriter days. I don't think that automatic drop caps, mandatory line widths, 'smart' quoting, etc help any authors express anything at all. Sure, the typewriter example is bad, but was the fake image grain necessary? Did it show how striking the keys harder slightly bolds the text? The LaserDisc example is not at all like writing with an italic pen, where you can express stylistic choice. Cramming everyone's text into some StandardPrettyPrintNFormatter [1] so your website looks pleasing to readers is pretty much the complete opposite of fostering creativity. It's a website for readers, not writers. Can I upload a scan of calligraphy? Maybe draw a title in bubbly block letters? Use a red pen? Of course not. Everything looks the same, and Butterick points out why
The goal is to create the illusion that everything on Medium belongs
to one editorial ecosystem, as if it’s the New York Times.
[1] Much like gofmt. That kind of conformity is great for coding style (can't read your crazy indentation), but it's just like how the constraints of the typewriter lead to a style of writing that eliminates stylistic differences (can't read your handwriting) so you can focus on content. Medium just adds another layer of conformity.
It's amusing that--speaking of typography on the web--disabling the download of fonts fails so gracelessly that I'm seeing this in your post:
The goal is to cre the il that every on Medium be-long
to one ed ecosys, as if it's the New York Times.
In most cases, I disagree with the point the author is trying to make. The author is arguing against the heavy restrictions Medium places on typesetting and layout. As a reader and author, I don't want the author to worry about these types of details. I want them to worry about ideas and storytelling.
The only exception I can think of to this rule is for highly visual medium like graphic novels. In this case, typesetting and layout are inseparable from the medium. That being said, I don't think Medium is designed for that type of use case
There may be other cases where creative choices in typesetting and layout may enhance the writing, but this usually isn't the case. Normally, when an author tries to "spice up" their writing this way it ends up looking like a crappy MySpace or GeoCities page.
As an aside, George RR Martin apparently uses WordStar 4.0 to write his books. I don't know if this proves or disproves the argument. Maybe if he had more control over the typesetting and layout, he would be done with Winds of Winter by now.
As an author who cares about typography, I don't think these things are mutually exclusive. Butterick's point here is that Medium takes away your choice on the web, where there's very frequently no separation between author and publisher. That separation doesn't exist if you host your own WordPress or Ghost installation, or on Tumblr or WordPress.com -- but it doesn't really exist if you publish on Medium or Svbtle or the like, either. The difference is that with Medium and similar services, you are acting as your own publisher but letting them act as graphic designer.
I understand that a lot of authors don't have the background for this sort of thing, and that LaTeX's basic philosophy here is a good one (i.e., don't screw with the defaults and your paper will look good, and even if you do screw with them you have to put a bit of effort in to start making things look crappy). And Medium will look better than slapping up unstyled HTML.*
But that means neither that you necessarily want everything to look like Medium's default -- which, unlike LaTeX, cannot be changed even a whit by authors -- nor that that your choices are only "write with Medium" and "learn professional typography." It's not difficult to slap up a WordPress or Ghost installation and choose from hundreds of themes, many of which have at least reasonable, if not amazing, typesetting standards.
Lastly, Butterick's point about Medium's business model is certainly worth paying attention to.
Good typography and layouts are informed by the ideas and story an author is trying to convey. If we are to say we want an author to care about the communication of their work, they should take an active interest in how that work is presented. The act of writing and the act of designing a text are separate activities but rely on heavy collaboration between the designer and author, even if those two are one in the same – to say that an author should eschew learning how the subtle marks of good typography affect their text is akin to asking a good comedian, musician or performer to ignore how a theatre's production comes together.
I remember that some time ago many people were wondering what's the point of Medium, how they're gonna monetize on it, etc. and I think the answer is perfectly clear nowadays - they want to be a youtube of written content.
Just as many people treat youtube as a get-go place for their video/music content needs (many people start to treat it as their TV, especially kids), Medium hopes people will, in time, treat Medium as the only magazine/newspaper/blog-place they need - and that should also push traditional media to utilize it (same as happens for TV channels and youtube). This is a long-term plan, but given how Internet tends to favour natural monopolies (see Google, Facebook, YouTube) it might actually work. Even if they will fail at this someone else will probably succeed.
Assume for a moment that the value proposition of Medium to the writers boils down to convenient and beautiful design, and Medium writers simply make the choice that this value is worth their giving their content away for free.
What about the risk of association between their writing and the Medium brand detracting from the writers' impact?
Even if it's just a small percentage of potential visitors for whom Medium is an anti-signal, why risk it?
I guess the Medium network may bring in more readers than the Medium brand bounces. Does anyone have information about what quantity and quality of readership the Medium network offers to an individual article or author?
during my time as a freelance designer/dev I had a particularly demanding client. I came up with several layouts and iterated for weeks on a single page with little progress. One day in frustration I filled the entire page with a tinyMCE textbox and said, "here, now you can make it exactly how you like it" - and he did, and it was terrible, but he was happy.
The large majority of people have terrible taste in design. I think design constraints on platforms like medium just serve to prevent people from actively ruining their content with bad design.
"If they sometimes act as if they discovered typography like it was the Higgs boson, we can forgive their excess of enthusiasm."
You left out the diamond - it made reading this article very strange, since I haven't trained myself not to vocalize it.
"If they ♢ sometimes act as if they discovered typography like it was the Higgs boson, we can forgive their excess of enthusiasm."
Isn't a few now of the major websites, just formatting our random output into templates? I'm convinced we're as a race still just as sold on having nice templates in our wordprocessors, only just now for the web, and here's the funny thing, how meanwhile everyone and his dog seems to want to write a new basic, oh so very basic, word processor, for each new website they drum up, the irony of it all is that to me it harkens so much more evocatively of the days of VBA ruling the small biz game, and VBA developer magazines selling code and tool bundles, and boy there was indeed a lot to be made, in that sort of thing... just nowadays we're suppose to all follow this or that ethos or ethic or way of fiddling our formats and pay someone else to curated our invaluable output online, preferably for a fee that does not exclude the possibility to better advertise to us...
Great article. To me, it explains why Medium is such a perfect fit for a certain kind of marketing material, and not much else beyond that.
After initial novelty wore off, I now decidedly tend to not read articles on Medium. It has become one of the countless sites I wouldn't miss at all.
There are some things I miss about a typewriter, like the visceral satisfaction of pounding on the keys and watching the text emerge.
I also miss typewriter fonts. Yes, I know I can get typewriter fonts, including the typewriter font that HD uses for its text entry boxes. I mean the unevenness of it due to mechanical variations, variations in the ribbon, etc., leading to every impression being slightly different.
Computer fonts are too perfect.
While they're typically considered gauche, there are typefaces which emulate a broken typewriter. I somewhat like those as well.
Is it just my MacBook Air + OS X, or is the Font (ironically) on that site painful to read?
Compare: https://medium.com/@willgossin/the-uncanny-valley-race-merit...
To:
http://practicaltypography.com/billionaires-typewriter.html
[Edit: Also - no HTTPS? And No Favicon?]
Not sure which you mean. I have a 3200x1800 13" display + Firefox and the practicaltypography font looks amazing. I basically had to read the whole article just because of the joy of the typography. Medium looks washed out in comparison.
I wound up reading the piece in Instapaper. To say this undermined the author's point would be an understatement...
I'm on a MBP with OS X, and I was almost distracted by how much I liked the design of the page. The way links worked (on desktop, at least) was really interesting, even though it seems so obvious once it's done.
No, you're right. The site has always looked poor to me across platforms.
Uhg yes. I couldn't even finish the article because the site was so difficult to get through.
I read the whole book recently (almost obsessively) and I think the font is great. I don't think there's some technical thing going on, I think you (and other commenters here) just don't like the font, which is your prerogative of course.
FireFox on Win10 and the article's font is not-that-fantastic. But Medium's font rendering in FF is really quite terrible: http://imgur.com/nvQFscE
For me the end-of-line word hyphenation also detracts from the readability.
Might be the font. He's using his own propriety font: http://practicaltypography.com/equity.html
What I don't understand about all this talk of layout and typography is why it is suddenly a good idea to have a website that consists of nearly 2/3 empty white space with a narrow band of text. Sorry but it isn't good typography if I have to zoom in to read your site.
I had written an article almost on the same note, "Medium never as a blog" on Jan 5, 2014 - https://medium.com/@fnkey/medium-com-never-as-a-blog-f1126d7...
Ha. I had a debate a couple years back with 3 of my coworkers about the value of constraints in our new hire developer test. The argument was akin to, "We want to see how creative the developers can be.". My rebuttal was, "If you want to see how creative somebody is, give them only one tool and see what they can accomplish.".
Alas, constraint wins - https://siteanalytics.compete.com/medium.com/
This post kinda collapses if you take out the assumption of Ev's moustache-twirling malice at its center.
This is disingenuous as shit. How does anyone who has a passing familiarity with minimalism have the nerve to write 'how is it possible to be “the best” while offering less?' Especially with the admission later in the article that yes, he designs tools with deliberate constraints.
I could certainly get behind an article arguing that Medium is bad for writers because of the centralization, loss of control of audience, etc. But this one isn't it, because it doesn't appear to acknowledge that some writers don't want to automate their own Wordpress themes (except with the dismissive 'if you really believe that' aside which I'm not counting).