I want you to have a blog. Despite this being nearly my entire online ethos, one situation I struggle with are design systems and UX blogs on Medium. A lot of them exist. Yet. I have difficulty understanding UX and design professionals in this space who yield their UX and design decisions over to the “everyone looks the same” content silo.

To be fair, I get why you or an organization would want to use a service like Medium:

• People are busy and maintaining a blog is work.
• It’s hard for the design team to get dev resources for a custom site.
• There’s “free” community engagement there.
• There’s even monetization paths.
• Self-publishing obsessed dorks aren’t the target market.

Don’t get me wrong– I’d rather have more blogs than no blogs so if that’s your situation don’t mind me and my niche beef. But consider for a moment that I can’t tell you the last Medium post I’ve read because they’re all the same to me. I follow a lot of UX and design systems blogs… but I can’t tell you a single person who writes on Medium. Those posts and authors have all blended together into a monolithic groupthinkpiece where individual voices and personality are flattened by the über theme.

If everyone is wearing the same uniform, you all look the same. You are interchangeable. Your voice exists in a crowded space of vanilla platitudes. A recent WIRED article suggested over 40% of the content on Medium is AI generated slop. I think the question for you –and for me– is how do you stand out in this fancy copy-pasted new world? My personal belief is that the answer starts with your own personal website that looks like you, talks like you, smells like you, and has quirks like you. I want that for you.