Editorial guidelines

How to publish your story with the largest design publication on Medium and speak to an audience of more than 300,000 designers worldwide.

We have been doing this for 10+years and we love collaborating with other designers on new articles and content for the community. If you decide to publish your article with us, you can:

• Be part of a community that values purpose and impartiality
• Reach an audience of 350k+ followers on Medium
• Be seen and loved by our Twitter followers
• Best stories are also featured on our Linkedin and Newsletter

Publishing your first article with us

1. Review this checklist.
2. Send the link to your article on Medium to hello@uxdesign.cc with a one-sentence description of what your article is about.
3. We will review all submissions and get back to you within 3 business days. We rarely take longer than that to respond, but if we do, please forgive us — we’re just having a hectic week.
4. After being accepted and reviewed, your article is added to the queue to be published. The best articles are not time-sensitive, so this shouldn’t be an issue.
5. Once your article is published with us, we ask you to keep it in our publication for at least 6 months.

Guidelines

Make sure the article is a good fit for our platform

• We publish articles, lists, opinions, tutorials and essays on User Experience Design, Usability, Interaction Design, Prototyping, Product Design, Research, Diversity in Design, and any other topic that directly relates to designing and building digital products.
• We don't publish articles too focused on business, product management, coding.
• We don't publish: portfolio cases; redesign projects without a strong case behind it and/or based just on the author’s experience; a review without an in-depth analysis; design exercises; destructive feedback.
• We don't publish: content marketing pieces; articles with affiliate links. Articles not submitted by the original author; articles focused anything other than adding value to the UX community.
• Need inspiration? Not sure if it’s a good fit? Check our trends report, newsletter, and top stories to see what we usually publish.

Provide references and examples

• Before start writing your article, search extensively our platform and the web about the theme that you are writing. It’s likely that someone wrote something about it before and it will help you to validate your ideas and give it a better shape.
• Link to all sources found your research and used in your article. It’s extremely important to acknowledge and reference to all sources, whether it is just to simply give credit to the author or to oppose one of their thoughts.
• Use different sources. This is crucial to make your argument valid and to build a solid article, showing different perspectives.
• Remove links from affiliate programs or that are promoting a specific content, service or professional.

Follow a cohesive structure

• Use Medium formatting for the title, lede, and headings. Don’t use bold, italic or all-caps for headings. Titles should be sentence-case.
• Break the article into sections. Use headings between sections and keep paragraphs short — clear headers help a lot the readers.
• Don't break your content in several articles (Part 1, Part 2, etc.). Each article should work as a standalone piece.

Add images

• Add at least one image. Your article must have at least one image that will be used as the cover image.
• Don’t add content to the image. We strongly recommend it to be simple, merely supportive (no text or information).

Add notes, credits, and links

• Give credit where credit is due. That includes inspiration and references. If you researched your topic as you should, you will have a few to add.
• Give credit to the author of the image. Even if it’s free or CreativeCommons.

Remove any content that is just promotional

• Remove any paragraph about you or links to personal sites. Use your bio for any personal link or information.
• Remove any content or link that are promoting your personal site, product, our brand. We don't accept affiliate links or links with paywalls (including email paywalls).
• Don't ask for claps.
• Don't promote personal links.

Review process

We only consider for review:

• Articles already on Medium. We don't review Google Docs, PDFs or just ideas. Send us a link to your draft on Medium.
• Articles that are not in a publication. If it is already in a publication, we won't consider it even if you remove from the other publication. Share your next article with us.
• Articles following the guidelines checklist above. Make sure it is following all the points above. Otherwise, it won’t be reviewed.

Review checklist

Our review process is basically asking some simple questions to check the points above:

• Is the theme a good fit for our publication?
• What's the takeaway for our readers? Is it clear?
• Is it adding value to the UX community? Is it a new perspective? Is it a current theme or is it too saturated?
• Is it promoting a healthier design community?
• Is the article well-structured, concise and focused on the takeaway?
• Does it provide enough examples and references to validate the point?

Be nice and give back to the community :)

We love publishing articles from all sort of authors — new designers, experienced ones, professionals from different fields. We want to create a place for all voices and audiences about UX. It's all about giving back to the community.

“Learn from the community, give back to the community”

About the UX Collective

A big part of what we learned in UX comes from online reading: articles, tutorials, resources, blogs. It’s all available out there, for free — and all you have to do is invest some time to dig it up.

But there’s a lot.

UX is becoming increasingly popular, and with that comes a lot of clutter, noise and disorientation. The UX Collective is our attempt at curating some of that content and giving it back to the community in a more structured and digestible way. All the costs of maintaining and running the UX Collective are personally paid by us, Fabricio and Caio.

The polar bear illustration is a reference to “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web”, one of the most famous books on UX.