Submitting your article to our publication

Prototypr is an official Medium partner publication, and publishing with us means you will keep ownership of all your content according to Medium's terms. Here's how to add your story to our publication so it can be distributed to our audience:

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2. Click the '...' icon to access the story settings:

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Featuring in Prototypr Weekly

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More About Medium's Paywall

Medium’s business model is designed to serve writers and readers — that’s it. It’s why, back in 2017, we moved away from the race-to-the-bottom incentives of advertising, not to mention its distracting banners, junky pop-ups, auto-play video, and data trackers that follow you around the internet. You won’t see any of that on Medium, and that’s because we don’t accept advertising. That said, we must have a way to fund this healthier experience. So, instead, Medium has a metered paywall and a subscription service, which costs only $5 per month or $50 per year.

For those not up on the industry lingo, here’s how a metered paywall works: Everyone can read several paywalled stories for free every month; people who subscribe can read them all. (You can read an explanation from our founder and CEO Ev Williams on why we launched the paywall, and you can get more detail about the model from Ev and from a recent Digiday article about our subscription business, and how it’s working.)

If a writer chooses to put their story behind the paywall they make it eligible to be reviewed by a curator and recommended to Medium readers.

Prototypr is an official Medium partner publication

Over the next 6 months, we’re piloting a partnership with Medium that will get you better reach when publishing on Prototypr’s Medium publication, and help you earn money from your writing, if you want to. Since we’ve been already been receiving submissions and publishing content that’s behind Medium’s paywall, it makes sense for us to experiment with this model.

We’ll be using this Prototypr Community forum as a place for you to get feedback on articles you'd like to publish in our Medium publication:

• Leave drafts and ideas in the relevant channel
• Use Chat to contact us for editing help. Here is much faster than email.
• Let us know your thoughts on the partnership programme

If you’d like to help edit the publication, please mention that too.

Publishing with us

Medium introduced their Partner Programme to enable writers to earn money from their work. Since its introduction almost a year ago, we’ve seen more and more writers choosing to publish their content behind Medium’s paywall.

It’s fine to publish outside of the Partner Programme - we’ll distribute it in Prototypr Weekly if it’s a good fit. However, your work won’t reach Medium’s homepage or be distributed to Medium topic subscribers. It’ll only be distributed to followers of your account:

Read more about the paywall and article distribution here.

The Paywall Dilemma

Content on design/code has generally been free for anyone to access in the past, as it is often supported by sponsors, or produced by a company selling a product or service. If not, the author can usually afford to share their work without profiting financially.

Not everyone is in this position though. There is evidence in the number of people taking advantage of Medium’s paywall opportunity. Whilst content has been free for readers, it has never been free to produce. The Partner Programme enables any Medium writer a chance to earn money from their work, without ads. This also results in content that hasn’t been influenced by sponsors, and the writer can get paid. We’re also happy to help edit your articles to tell your story better.

Read more about publishing on Medium here.

What’s your opinion?

If you would prefer to write outside of Medium’s paywall, at the moment, we cannot commission these articles. However we are happy to distribute your articles to subscribers of Prototypr Weekly, and publish them on our own platform outside of Medium. This will be improved in Prototypr 3.

This is a pilot partnership, so we welcome your feedback and opinions. If you’re a reader or writer that is being affected by this, please let us know and why.

How to enable to people to make blocks inside templates?- need help with that

cos blocks and templates are kindof the same thing 2:03 PM templates made of blocks

Instead of blocks, the term ‘component’ - everyone in design knows this word

Templates Overview

It will be very tricky to combine modules from different templates, as they may have different styles associated with them

This was one of the more recent device preview mode:

Scroll Behaviour

Awful to have 2 scrolls - one inside a preview, and one for the main area:

[Chris Konings]:After playing around with the Letter UI I've had some initial thoughts on improvements.

When designing or in 'editing' mode I think it would be nice if we didn't have the restrictions of the device box, **currently we are scrolling twice

• (1) one to see the full device and once to see the email within the device - could we remove the device size restrictions and have a default size for the email
• (2) that is endless height depending on how much content you have -

Response:

(1)Definitely agree with this. Personally from using it, I really hated scrolling inside that stupid device constraint!

(2) good point, Ann has mentioned this too that 600px is the max width, so that works

Device Preview

iPad devices can be shown in Preview only. Don’t think it’s needed in edit mode

Agreed! So we need a way to switch between edit and preview mode. How could that work?

If the device is shown, would it be like the existing device view, so it's scrollable within the device?

• Is ipad really need it? It looks desktop and iphone serve the same function. Those are Preview, yes?

The idea was to have the ability to switch between devices:

However this implies the editor is completely WYSIWYG. Maybe this would be better as a separate preview mode. iPad isn't completely necessary either - I think it looks nice, but not useful.

• When we want to offer ’preview options (desktop, ipad, iphone). Just wondering not all people have apple devices and if they have a laptop, supposedly they can use Letter already correct?

Good point, I suppose we could make them generic - desktop, tablet, phone?

Here are some scraps of the thoughts behind the Theme and Component concepts in Letter:

Packages or Themes?

• In addition to these components, we also have a 'packages' or themes section in the menu, where people can install themes from. This pattern is seen in VS Code, Framer etc.

Here's a sketch of this flow:

• User clicks on the packages menu icon, and it shows a list of available themes.
• Upon clicking install package, components from that package appear in every other menu (e.g. headers/footers...)

It's open to change!!

Terminology

Theme vs Style vs Content

Content and Style are better! Or maybe 'Style' could be 'Theme' since then we could have individual styles related to content sit inside the content panel with what may be less confusion?

Here I am thinking what is the difference between style and content, and using 'theme' and 'content' may be better - what you think?

It's not obvious that there's a waitlist:

Need to add more information about the beta program, and how the invite system actually works.

Letter is a complex tool to create! I've got HotJar and Sentry set up to help monitor issues and improve the app. This will keep us informed of the bugs as they happen, but any feedback and ideas are very welcome in this channel.

HotJar

I've recently installed HotJar to monitor how the app is used, and identify UI and usability issues whilst people are testing out the beta:

Sentry

We've also got Sentry set up to track errors that occur: