It's not self-evident to me that plain peanut butter isn't healthier than frozen pizza. This statement is not a metaphorical opinion on Medium. I just think he should have picked a simile that was more inarguably accurate.

Also, his web page kind of makes my eyes hurt. It's too harsh, somehow. This also damages his credibility. In fact, now I'm kind of wondering if this isn't some sort of reverse-psychology Medium-promotion and the bad simile is deliberate.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 7:09 AM on February 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also, his web page kind of makes my eyes hurt.
I thought the font was awful (is that what he's selling?), but it might be my browser.
posted by MtDewd at 7:22 AM on February 19, 2015

Yeah, this essay looks awful and that totally invalidates his point. He also links to his typewriter habits, many of which I actually like. I actually hate curly quotes, for a start, but the whole list makes me feel that "good typography" is heavily overrated. (For instance, he complains that we ignore ligatures; I say leave them in antiquarian books where they belong.)

I write my own blog and I think a bit about how to present it, but people have to recognize that text in the current period should be presented as straightforwardly as possible; you just don't know what context it will be read in.
posted by graymouser at 7:30 AM on February 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I tried it in IE8. He does not want me to use IE8 to view his product, so I can't see how that font looks there, but his message is in a beautiful font, whatever my default IE font is.
posted by MtDewd at 7:30 AM on February 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

The "death to typewriters" article he links includes a sample paragraph, which is supposed to serve as an example of the glorious future that awaits us once we abandon our obsolete typewriter habits, and which looks like crap.
posted by escabeche at 7:30 AM on February 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

The argument I found worthwhile was less about presentation per se than about branding and advertisements: Medium is going to sell ads for revenue but not pay most of its contributors for writing for the site. So it's a classier-looking Huffington Post for tech-y people, I guess.
posted by immlass at 7:32 AM on February 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

It was pretty unconvincing, but maybe I'm not the intended audience. I don't have a website or a blog or even a tumblr. I don't publish on Medium but I do use it to write.

They have an "unlisted" option for stories that I have found is perfect for things I want to share only with close friends and family: a recap of my and wife's honeymoon, the first few weeks after our first child was born, etc. The default design options (and limitations) are good enough that these stories always look good, it handles photography well, and it really is quite an enjoyable environment to write in.
posted by AceRock at 7:33 AM on February 19, 2015

escabeche, I know; the ligature on the word "aspect" in the last sentence of the first paragraph makes me want to throw a typewriter at the person who wrote it. I think the typewritten version looks awesome.
posted by graymouser at 7:34 AM on February 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

I thought I was going to hate this because I am uninterested in design and I think many writers are. Words are words I don't give a fuck about getting fewer fonts or whatever. But he makes some very good points about how platforms like medium strip away freedom not just in design but in method of delivery and monetization from writers in exchange for convenience, an exchange that is particularly bewildering because there are so many other free platforms for publication that allow for literally anything we could want. The last line is salient:

"As writ?ers, we don¡¯t need com?pa?nies like Medium to tell us how to use the web. Or de?fine open?ness and democ?racy. Or tell us what¡¯s a ¡°waste of [our] time¡± and what¡¯s not. Or de?ter?mine how and where read?ers ex?pe?ri?ence our work. We need to de?cide those things for ourselves."

But the problem is, we writers often can't just want to do whatever we want and churn out content for our own shingle. We need constraints in order to be inspired, and self-constraints rarely cut it. We need editors, sometimes in the guise of a 140 character limit. Moreover, we need readers. And Medium allows for the possibility of a built in community audience, in the same way that writing for every established forum from the Atlantic or here on Metafilter comes with an audience of at least several. Obama doesn't have a Livejournal, he writes on Medium. Maybe I should too! -- is the thinking. Money is nice, but readers are better. And so we trade the possibility of--what, selling Adsense space for nickels a day _maybe_ on Wordpress-- for the easily shared and well respected and uniform nature of Medium. It's tough, but, I think, a fair and above board trade. We know what we're giving up.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:36 AM on February 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

But un?like the Times, Medium pays for only a small frac?tion of its sto?ries. The rest are sub?mit?ted¡ªfor free¡ªby writ?ers like you. Af?ter a long time be?ing elu?sive about its busi?ness model, Medium re?vealed that it plans to make money by¡ªsur?prise!¡ªsell?ing ad?ver?tis?ing. This means dis?play?ing ads, but also col?lect?ing and sell?ing data about read?ers and writ?ers. So Medium will ex?tract rev?enue from every story, whether it paid for that story or not. (By the way, will that rev?enue be shared with writ?ers? Um, no.)

This shit drives me up the way. The first I'm going to do when time travel is invented is go back and strangle anyone from the dawn of the internet who proclaimed "Information wants to be free". 'Cause no one can pay their bills that way.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:39 AM on February 19, 2015

For someone interested in "practical typography" he seems to've missed the memo that sans serif reads better onscreen. (There's a reason for Helvetica/Arial/Verdana and so on being web defaults.)
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 7:39 AM on February 19, 2015

HAY HAS ANYONE MENTIONED THE FONT ON THIS GUYS WEB SITE OUCH WHO WATCHES THE WATCH MEN YOU KNOW? DOCTOR HEEL THYSELF WOOF WOOF (BEACUE THIS FONT IS A REAL DOG!!!!)
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:43 AM on February 19, 2015 [10 favorites]

Anyway, following people on Medium means I get to read stuff like this in my inbox every few days and that's really useful for the writer and me because I get to LOL and he gets readers and that's good enough for him so we're cool. It's not like McSweeny's was paying beaucoup bux before this new thing came around.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:45 AM on February 19, 2015

And Medium allows for the possibility of a built in community audience, in the same way that writing for every established forum from the Atlantic or here on Metafilter comes with an audience of at least several.

I guess this is what I don't get. People read the Atlantic or Metafilter on purpose. Nobody reads Medium on purpose, do they? You see something that's on Medium because somebody shares it. Just like you see something that's on my Wordpress blog because somebody shares it. Or because I shared it myself on Twitter, just like I would do if I wrote stuff on Medium. It's not clear to me how Medium differs right now from the Huffington Post or Forbes.com, things which offer a certain amount of stylistic uniformity so as to look like a single "publication," but which, unlike a publication, have no barrier to entry and are mostly terrible, and which nobody reads on purpose.
posted by escabeche at 7:47 AM on February 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm glad that some people care deeply about typography, and I'm glad that some of them care deeply about creating workmanlike styles for websites like medium.

For most kinds of reading I do on my computer, the best thing that the typography can do is get out of the way. If I read a typical article that is not about typography, and I give any conscious thought to the typography, that's probably not a good thing. Because I wasn't thinking about the subject of the article.
posted by jepler at 7:47 AM on February 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

Medium is the Apple concept applied blogging: a simple well-thought design that pleases most. As a writer, you have almost no choices to make about typesetting. The down side is that in a year or two this will quickly become the 12pt. Times New Roman cliche, as everyone will use and become used to it. It may become uncool, but that's the price of utility; 12pt TNR is still the standard for most boring documents out there because it's easy to read.

Of course this pisses off people who want to do something other than a single simple well-thought out design like Mr. Butterick.
posted by bonehead at 7:56 AM on February 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Nobody reads Medium on purpose, do they?

Well I do but I'm probably weird. I follow people on there which is easier and cleaner than most publications. It's a better experience than reading the Huff Po because it's just text & images and few ads. It allows for people to set up community magazines within the platform really easily. And like I said it has a certain cach¨¦ where cool authors and famous people are using it to blog and as portfolio sites. If I was going to go back to freelancing I'd definitely use it rather than Tumblr, because Tumblr is way better for images than for writing. So this is pretty circular (people read medium because people use it because people r--) and it doesn't mean it's without pitfalls, but, there's something to be said for writing in a space meant ONLY to foster authorship and sharing of writing rather than porn or stock tips or funny images or whatever it is Huff Po is trying to do these days.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:58 AM on February 19, 2015

?
posted by Buttons Bellbottom at 8:03 AM on February 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

You see something that's on Medium because somebody shares it. Just like you see something that's on my Wordpress blog because somebody shares it.

This is true, and you could argue that that's how a lot, maybe most people come across things now. I don't go to The Atlantic's or even the New Yorker's website directly, I stumble upon articles from those publishers via Twitter (or, increasingly, Nuzzel).

Maybe that's what Medium is good for. If I want to write a thinkpiece on Kendrick Lamar's latest verse and have it look good and professional and be able to share it as a standalone piece (and have the Twitter/Facebook preview look right) and not have to worry about setting up a Wordpress blog (and all the associated design decisions) just to do it, Medium is the best way to do that for someone who only writes very occasionally, doesn't maintain a blog, etc.
posted by AceRock at 8:05 AM on February 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Here's a better example of a community collection in Medium -- The Message (99% mefi's own).
posted by Potomac Avenue at 8:07 AM on February 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Also, the confusion on what Medium is or what it is for seems to be intentional. You have a mix of well-written, well-edited pieces, hackjob thinkpieces, occasional straight-up plagiarism, that all look like they've been published by the same magazine. I think this is on purpose. I come across enough quality content on Medium, that when I see something on my Twitter timeline that is published on medium.com, I find myself more willing to click on it than something from tumblr, wordpress, etc. and more likely to at least check out a Medium article than something hosted on a domain I don't recognize at all. This is the case even though I know Medium has exactly zero barriers-to-entry. It's weird but they're doing something right in how they are blurring these lines.
posted by AceRock at 8:15 AM on February 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

I rather enjoy Butterick's typographic commentaries. Perhaps his style isn't ideal for web pages. While I haven't explored the Practical Typography site yet, the advice in its predecessor Typography for Lawyers is excellent; especially in comparison to the prevailing customs in formatting legal documents. I have the print version of that book and on a page Butterick's choices are functional and aesthetically pleasing.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:17 AM on February 19, 2015

Heh. Actually this thread spurred me to post something to Medium for the first time, something I wrote a long time ago and have never found any use for beyond confusing tourists.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 8:22 AM on February 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

I was surprised by all the negativity here. As someone who's done a lot of reading around typography, I was pretty impressed by the care he put into his personal site, which may because of my preference for print (though I also like webtrash). I am curious, for the people who think that his site looks awful, what didn't you like about it? I'm not saying this in a skeptical way--just genuinely curious what drove people away, especially since I was thinking about stealing some of the "moves" on his personal site.

PS I wonder if some part of it has to do with him presented in this context as condescending to a product [Medium] that people here might use frequently; I feel like MeFi haterade often comes out in an anti-snobbery flavor.

PPS I think a lot of people are responding to him as an antiquarian flaneur, but a lot of his typographic rules are precisely about the designer getting out of the way. For example, he says the most important thing is to pick really subtle readable body text, since that's what readers will be actually engaging with.
posted by johnasdf at 8:32 AM on February 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

I only read Medium for the cartoons. All arguments about lack of typoraphic control are kind of moot at The Nib, aren't they?
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:47 AM on February 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

PS I wonder if some part of it has to do with him presented in this context as condescending to a product [Medium] that people here might use frequently; I feel like MeFi haterade often comes out in an anti-snobbery flavor.

He's just generally condescending about niche topics. Hell, I work as a graphic designer, so I care about these things. But I also realize that generally speaking, a document using times new roman is readable by the general populace. That doesn't mean it's the best it can be, but yeah, most people will be able to read it just fine.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:52 AM on February 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I am curious, for the people who think that his site looks awful, what didn't you like about it?

It's not so much appearance as him doing some things that kind of neglect or defeat the "hyper" in the "text." This is what I mean:

His affectation of using ? a character to announce the presence of a hyperlink ? each and ? every time is ? a little distracting, and would seem to ? run counter to notion of subtle readability. YMMV.

He wouldn't need those if the hyperlinks used a level of contrast that would allow their reader to discern their presence independently of the ? typographic intervention.

Also, is he using images of numbers for the numbered lists? If so, that means there ain't no text there. He likely wouldn't countenance using a picture of a font to replace the actual font set, so why's he doing that?

So anyway, I found all of the above so distracting that it was hard to engage with the content. YMMV.

The typewriter piece can't pass some basic html validation that means a lot of people can't read it.

I mean, I agree in principle with a lot of the stuff he's saying on his Typography for Lawyers site as someone who works in the communications field in the corporate world. I work with designers a lot, and always take their side when dealing with a difficult client who wants to second-guess sound design decisions made by a designer. Because we pay them to design, and yes, they should be listened to on the subject.

But man, beyond having nice-looking business cards and a nice-looking website, selling this proposition to most of the lawyers I know and work with, in the middle of their 80-hour work week, seems hopelessly naive and condescending at the same time:

If you ignore typography, you are ignoring an opportunity to improve both your writing and your advocacy.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:13 AM on February 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

This was the bit that struck me:

Mr. Williams con?cedes that Medium has ¡°stripped out a lot of the power that other ed?i?tors give you.¡± So how is it pos?si?ble to be ¡°the best¡± while of?fer?ing less?

All this tells me is that while this guy may know a lot about typesetting, he doesn't know a damn thing about user interface design. A limited, well-chosen feature set beats the pants off of a bloated kitchen-sink approach any day of the week.
posted by webmutant at 9:47 AM on February 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

The list of 6 "things we're doing to improve typography" at the end of Marcin's article is really interesting: each of them is illustrated with animations that show the before/after. Medium do a lot of subtle on-the-fly adjustments to text to make it more typesetty and less typewritery.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 10:18 AM on February 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Fonts suck.
posted by rhizome at 11:54 AM on February 19, 2015

Mostly what mandolin conspiracy said. Plus: I resent the time he made me spend figuring out that the diamonds were links, what purpose does it serve to put DVD in small caps, and by the time I got to the custom "N¡ã" abbreviation symbol I wanted to punch him in the face.

The whole thing is twitchy, full of spiky little points for my attention to snag on.
posted by benito.strauss at 12:22 PM on February 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure how Medium is different than any other blogging platform? Do people complain about Tumblr or Blogger or Wordpress.com not paying you for publishing your content?
posted by divabat at 12:56 PM on February 19, 2015

The hollow ? for links is a funny one. It's a bit distracting...but how much of that is the symbol itself, and how much is just that he's using an innovative link denotation technique that we're not used to? Isn't every method of displaying a link distracting? Underlining, bolding, and using color all draw undeserved attention to that portion of the text. My current hypothesis is that hyperlinks are just inherently distracting. Lately I've been dreaming about shunting them entirely out of the main flow of text with things like sidenotes.

The point is that we shouldn't hamstring ourselves to the first user interface technique that comes around. I understand that UI has tremendous inertia (I'm looking at you, QWERTY), but let's innovate where we can. One of the web's best features is that it is not set in stone.

Anyway, I liked the article and find his attention to the topic invigorating, even when I disagree with his specific choices.
posted by daveliepmann at 1:25 PM on February 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

My current hypothesis is that hyperlinks are just inherently distracting. Lately I've been dreaming about shunting them entirely out of the main flow of text with things like sidenotes.

I think he managed to make them more distracting, but that's just my opinion.

I have to say, though, I love the way Grantland handles footnotes in their text. Every time I click on one it's a pleasant little UI surprise.

*clicks on footnote*

"Ah, that's nice."
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:44 PM on February 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I like those Grantland footnotes, too. I'd rather they weren't such a bright red, though.
posted by daveliepmann at 11:52 PM on February 19, 2015