Create a quote image
Turn a quote or a thought into a square image on a colored background, with the font you like, ready to post on social media. Everything runs in your browser.
Why quote images work
Quotes are among the most shared content on social media: a strong line on a well-designed background catches the eye, communicates a value and makes people save or reshare the post. A square 1080×1080 format is perfect for the Instagram and Facebook feed.
Tips for a good result
Keep the quote short and punchy: a few words read better and stick longer. Try different fonts and backgrounds until you find the combination that fits the message. If you like, add the author to give credit to the quote.
What makes a sentence legible on an image
Three things, in order of importance. Contrast: light text on a dark ground or the reverse, and where the background changes you need a semi-transparent veil or an outline, because a white sentence crossing a sky disappears. Line length: beyond ten or twelve words a line the eye gets lost, and on a square image it is better to break into short lines.
And hierarchy: the quotation large, the author small. If they carry the same weight, the eye does not know where to start. The most useful rule is that a quotation is read in two seconds; over three, it is not read at all.
How short it has to be
Very. Under fifteen words a sentence is taken in at a glance; over twenty-five, on a phone, hardly anyone reads it. That is why the quotations that circulate are nearly always fragments: not because people are shallow, but because that format cannot carry long text.
If the sentence is fine and long, the right route is not shrinking the type but cutting it, keeping the part that stands on its own. Small type on an image is the sure way not to be read, because in a feed the thumbnail is three centimetres wide.
Attribution, which is not a detail
Half the quotations circulating online are attributed to the wrong person: Einstein, Gandhi and Confucius alone collect thousands of lines they never said, because an authoritative name makes a sentence more shareable. Before publishing it is worth a search: almost always you find at once that the line is not by whoever you thought.
On the rights side, a short aphorism by a living author remains a creative work, though quotation with an indication of the source is allowed within limits. The real practical problem, instead, is the background image: a photograph taken from the internet is not free merely because it was on the internet.
Why these images work on social media
Because a strong sentence is content consumed in two seconds and shared in one: whoever reposts it is not sharing information, they are sharing something they wish they had said. It is why quotations are among the most widespread content there has ever been, and also why they saturate.
The limit is that they are extremely easy to produce and therefore there are far too many: what tells a good collection from a thousand identical ones is visual consistency — same typeface, same palette, same layout — which after ten posts makes the author recognisable before the name is even read.
Nearby tools
To write on any photo there is Write on a photo, for the background Blur part of a photo and for colours Dominant colours from a photo. For social formats Resize photo, and for text limits Social character counter.