Source: Medium.design - Medium | Read More
Medium Day is our biggest gathering of humans who love reading and writing around the world. It’s a full day of sessions spanning a diverse range of topics for writers and technologists alike, and it’s totally free. Grab your ticket here:
Medium Day · September 18, 2026
Design at Medium historically has done a session at Medium Day, and this year we’re trying something a little different. Medium’s about stories, and to me, when we talk about design, talk about the work, storytelling’s way more insightful and substantive than just a polished case study.
What’s more, our team spans a wide range of strengths and skillsets, just like the things we designed and built this year. So we’re doing a panel this year, and I’ll be facilitating.
Craig Atallah Frost joined the team right around the time I did last year. This year he helped define how writers get real control over how AI companies use their stories, and he’s now applying that same thinking to how Medium surfaces stories to human readers, not just machines.
Emily Kelly designed everything you’re seeing at Medium Day today — down to the last detail. We brand Medium Day with care — and there are a lot of sessions — she’s going to walk us through her process and inspiration for that system.
jeremy is driving the vision for TK, our social writing tool that opens up more broadly today. He’ll talk through how fast the product has evolved this year and what it’s actually like to design something that ships constantly.
Nouf Aljowaysir leads the design of our social layer. She’s also got a separate talk she’s giving later today about how Reposting and our new Activity Feed came to be — features built on a real bet about how people connect and rediscover writing on Medium, not just scroll past it.
👉 Her talk is later today, 2:00–2:30 EST / 12:00–12:30 PST
Sophie Aguado is doing a ton behind the scenes, but one of the many she shipped recently was Custom Footers a feature that hints at where Medium’s headed.
We’ll be joined by our VP of Product and Design, Cassie McDaniel, who insists on the spotlight not being on her, but I’ll find out a way to do it anyway because she’s an amazing leader.
👉 Tune in today! We go live at 11:00am EST / 9:00am PST
For those of you who came for the music—first, please say hello in the comments, lol. Second, check out the shiny new custom footer at the end of my story and let me know what else you might want to make your home on Medium feel your own. I’m pretty private online overall, but something most people at work and in my personal life know about me, is that I love electronica. It’s what I listen to when I need to get in flow and become one with my computer to design things. It’s one of the ways I even got into design in the first place.
Here and there I’ll be switching that button up to link to a mix I think is cool. But for today, as I felt the pre-speaker nerves creep up, I shook it off with some Felix da Housecat. I’m not from Chicago, but I’ve lived there temporarily and made as many trips into the city as I could as an undergrad at Notre Dame. I love Chicago—and I just gave away my answer to the pop quiz part of our design discussion today. Check us out!
https://medium.com/media/12a2650376424894877c59844fd7f90c/href
Come to the Design Team Trunkshow at Medium Day 2026 was originally published in Medium.design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.