Medium Brand Guidelines: Black, White & Serif

Medium has redrawn its mark roughly every two to three years.

Medium’s mark has had several distinct lives: a bold slab-serif ‘M’ (2012) set in the typeface Stag; a friendly green origami ‘M’ (2015); a flat black-and-white letterform plus the white-M-on-black-square monogram (2017), by studio Manual; and a 2020 rebrand by COLLINS that introduced a stylised ellipsis (a solid dot plus two tapering ellipses) as the ‘unfinished thought’ icon. A common error is dating the black-square monogram to 2020 — it’s 2017; the ellipsis is the 2020 work. The everyday mark today is still the black ‘M’. All are protected, so our homage stays abstract.

The restraint is the brand.

Medium’s identity is aggressively black-and-white — black type and marks on white, echoing a serious print publication and keeping the writing centre-stage. The monogram is a white ‘M’ knocked out of black (essentially #000000 / #FFFFFF). Green was real but era-specific (the 2015 origami M, early UI accents); there’s no reliable published ‘Medium green’ hex, and the values that float around online are generic colour-dictionary entries, not brand tokens — so we don’t cite them. The 2020 COLLINS work expanded illustration colour, but the logo stayed black.

Medium is Ev Williams’s answer to short-form.

Medium was founded in August 2012 by Evan Williams — co-founder of Blogger and Twitter — with fellow Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. The premise was a clean, distraction-free home for longer-form, quality writing, an explicit reaction to Twitter’s 140-character constraint. It later became a paid membership / metered paywall business, paying writers through a reader-engagement Partner Program. The typography-first, black-and-white identity is the direct expression of ‘reading comes first.’

Medium’s real identity is its typefaces.

Medium’s 2017 system paired Noe Display (a high-contrast serif, the basis of the wordmark and headlines) with Marat Sans for UI, and set article bodies in Charter — Matthew Carter’s 1987 serif engineered for low-resolution screens. The 2020 COLLINS refresh moved headlines to GT Super (Grilli Type). Note Charter and GT Super are licensed retail faces, not Medium commissions. The specimen below pairs a display serif with a clean sans in that reading-first spirit.

Almost the entire palette, on purpose. Click a swatch to copy the hex.

Medium’s core is near-pure black on white — the monogram is white-on-black. Medium doesn’t publish third-party hex tokens, so we treat black as #000000 and white as #FFFFFF and hedge anything more precise. Green existed historically (the 2015 mark, early UI) but has no verified official hex, and the #39AD48-type values online are misattributed colour-dictionary entries — so they’re deliberately omitted here. Copy the working values below.

Medium’s truest piece of design isn’t the logo — it’s the reading experience itself.

Most brands express themselves through a mark; Medium expresses itself through how a page of writing feels. Generous margins, a single measured column, restrained typographic hierarchy and an almost total absence of clutter turn the act of reading into the product’s signature. The famously clean editor extends the same idea to writing: a near-blank page that gets out of the way. This is the black-and-white ethos made functional — the identity is not painted on top of the interface, it is the interface. When the design recedes far enough, the words become the only thing left, which is exactly the point of a platform built around ‘reading comes first.’

Small, deliberate touches carry the personality: the estimated read time shown on every story, the calm pacing of the layout, the way a headline set in a high-contrast serif quietly signals ‘this is worth your attention.’ Each is a design decision in service of a single promise. It makes a useful counter-example to the idea that a strong brand needs a loud logo or a signature colour. Medium has arguably neither — it has redrawn its mark repeatedly and built its palette almost entirely from black on white — yet it remains instantly recognisable the moment you land on a story. The lesson for designers is quietly radical: sometimes the most ownable thing a brand has is not a symbol at all, but a feeling of using it that no competitor can copy without copying the whole experience.

Keep the reading-first, black-and-white idea on hand — save it to a board.