A note to my Medium followers :)
In short: Please keep in touch!
TL;DR version: I’ve left Marker, but I hope you’ll keep in touch, and consider following my Art of Noticing newsletter. (It’s free.)
As many of you may know, Medium recently announced a change in its editorial strategy that included a buyout offer to editorial employees, and I am among those who took it. My last day was Wednesday, and I will dearly miss the wonderful Marker team in particular. Some are staying, others going; more on that here and here.
But the point of this post is to acknowledge that I will also miss this readership, and wanted to say a quick word of thanks to those of you who read (clapped for, highlighted, responded to, shared, or even criticized) my work for Marker.
I just passed 9,000 followers, a great majority of whom clicked the follow button in the last 12 months. We did quite a bit of tweaking and revising and experimenting with Marker’s mission and content, and my role in particular evolved significantly. So I’m particularly pleased and proud that my following grew consistently through all the changes.
I’m sorry that I won’t be able to continue the recently launched Object of the Week column, the new Everyday Design Icons series, or my long-running Off Brand column. I’m also discontinuing my fledgling Thingdown series, an experiment that was running only on my personal Medium feed.
But meanwhile, as I take some time off and sort what comes next, I will be continuing the newsletter I launched back in 2019 (before joining Medium) in connection with my book The Art of Noticing:
The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy In the Everyday offers exercises, prompts, provocations, games and things you can actually do to build attention muscles, stave off distraction, pick up on what everybody else overlooked, and experience the joy of noticing. Indiebound | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Knopf.
The newsletter offers related news and ideas that have come along since the book. You can look through past issues here. Check it out!
That said, there’s no reason to un-follow me here!
I’ve used Medium for one-offs and experiments of my own for many years before joining Marker’s staff— indeed, I even contributed several pieces to re:form, a terrific (now defunct) design publication that was part of an earlier Medium experiment with editorial — and I can imagine doing so again in the future. Medium remains a handy, easy-to-use tool, and obviously tons of people use it for all kinds of writing from a huge range of creators.
But this post is not about Medium, or even about me. It’s about you. I simply want to be transparent with those of you who have expressed enough interest to follow me here, and let you know why those series are ending and why I’m not posting regularly in general. Now you know!
I’ve truly enjoyed having this home base for the last 18 months, and I really hope we can stay connected. Stay well / rw
