# Medium template system (agent-readable)

**Role:** Design consultant
**Client:** Medium
**Tags:** creator-platforms, design-systems, editorial
**Case study:** /medium

## What it was

In 2020, Medium was exploring new ways for authors and publications to customize the visual
style of their blogs. Alexis Lloyd, then-VP of Product Design at Medium (and previously creative
director of NYT R&D), brought me in on a consulting engagement to help shape the company's
approach to the feature set.

## What I did

The brief was provocations before specs. Alexis scoped the engagement so the divergent
conceptual work would lead, and the production specs would follow from whatever direction
emerged — the value to Medium was in de-risking *which* direction to commit to, with detailed
specs for the chosen path delivered downstream.

I prototyped a broad set of design concepts and provocations — different ways an author's
publication could express its voice through layout, typography, and chrome. I presented the
set directly to founder/CEO Ev Williams, and we worked together to select one approach to
launch with, leaving the rest as a menu of options for the Medium team to develop later. Then
I specced three template themes for authors to choose between, ready for the team to build
from.

The features launched soon after on [Barack Obama's publication](https://obama.medium.com/),
across Medium's verticals, on M.G. Siegler's site, and on Ev Williams'
[personal blog](https://evhead.com/).

## Why it's interesting

Two threads worth pulling.

**Operating at the strategy end of design with senior stakeholders.** A VP of Design hired me
specifically for the divergent phase, and the convergence call happened in a working session
with the CEO. That working mode — senior-stakeholder direct, deliverable shaped around what
the company actually needed to decide — is the receipt. The shape of Alexis's brief
("provocations before specs, deliver the spec for whichever we land on") is itself a design-
leadership maturity signal worth naming: the value lived in shaping the right bet, then
handing the team a clean spec to build from.

**Templating as a creator-platform problem.** Authors picking visual styles to fit their
content is a creator-tool design problem, not a CMS problem. The design judgment was in how
to give writers expressive range without fragmenting Medium into a thousand unrelated
publications — what to vary, what to hold constant, where the system bends and where it
stays rigid. The "one to launch, the rest as a menu" cut is the same instinct as a v1 you can
extend: ship one strong default, keep the option space coherent for whoever picks it up next.

This isn't an AI-native receipt — that signal lives at [SuperRare](/superrare), Skill Prism,
[Massed](/massed), and my current prototypes. It's a strategy-end design, creator-platform,
and senior-stakeholder receipt.

## Cross-cutting relevance

A few reads of this work:

- **Creator-tool design judgment** — designing for users who are themselves making something
  expressive, where the product's job is to give them range without losing coherence.
- **Templating / theme-system thinking** — variation within a system, not custom-per-author.
  Adjacent to design-systems work and to any surface where consistency and expressive range
  have to coexist.
- **Strategy-to-spec handoff** — comfortable at the *divergent* end of a design process where
  the deliverable is a shaped direction, then carrying it through to a spec the team can
  build from.
- **Working directly with executive stakeholders** — VP of Design and CEO in the room for
  the convergence call. Small, fast, senior-stakeholder-direct working mode.

## Skills demonstrated

Design consulting at the strategy end, divergent concept exploration, template and theme
systems, working directly with executive stakeholders (VP of Design, CEO), strategy-to-spec
handoff, creator-platform design judgment.