A Tiny Solution to the Zettabyte Era: TypeQuote

Why I built a daily quote machine — and how designers might resist the noise.

Skies. Credit: Author

Dear Designer,

There are about 2 million words in the English language. Approximately 170 million individual books have been published, with a shocking 11,000 new books coming out every single day.

Harder to estimate still, but there are maybe 1 trillion words on the internet.

And on that internet, there are approximately 180 zettabytes (each zettabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of data, including photos of kittens and videos about making espressos in Teslas. If you wanted to download the entire internet, it would take you, oh, about 2 billion years.

We live in the Zettabyte Era.

How do we make sense of this inundation? How do we come to terms with so much “content” and so many people and organizations demanding our attention, our time, and our energy? Moreover, how do we designers and artists protect our precious minds and our expansive souls, as we absorb not just the digital universe but the vast and unfolding rhythms and relationships that come to us and confound us.

One answer is lessening. Reduce our exposure to the zettabytes. Increasingly attenuate our attention to what corporations shove in front of us. And to become the teacher to ourselves that we wish we always had.

This week I launched TypeQuote, a new website that will publish one highly curated and highly opinionated quotation each and every day. It’s designed to be an everlasting machine for quotation marks. (Actually, there are not quotation marks — you just have to imagine them.)

Why would I do such a thing? Three main reasons.

1. Curated content. I have always loved good quotations and I worship the great ones. While there are dozens of quotation sites out there, most of them suffer from feature bloat, truly terrible user experience, or just plain overwhelm. Many of these sites are just meant to serve up ads or clock your whereabouts or sell books. Finding a good quote for a newsletter or sharing on social media can be exhausting — I can often feel my own anxiety rise as I get deeper into the search for the perfect one.
   
   And half the time you don’t even know if the person to whom a quote is attributed is even accurate. For instance:
   
   “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
   
   Often attributed to Albert Einstein or even Benjamin Franklin, some form of this quote actually goes back to the 19th century.
   
   On TypeQuote, I’ll indicate the original source (URL) for each quotation. Where I can’t, I’ll do my best to fact check it.
   

2. Inspiration and provocation. Nearly every piece of fresh content today, when it’s not meant to inform, is meant to either intrigue or provoke. That’s how attention and money are won. But most of the time, what we read, or are being subjected to, are either drivel or dross. In my wanderings online and off, I will be looking for quotes of under 100 words that make sense of the world in a very different way. They may inspire, anger, or argue but hopefully they will just work.
   
   Yes, I am sure that TypeQuote will also feature treacly, timeworn and threadbare quotes. And I apologize in advance for that — sometimes an oldie is also a goodie. But I’m going to do my best to find quotes that are fresh and on the frontier of fun or factuality.
   

3. Expectation and aggregation. There are a few newsletters (probably five) that I cannot wait to receive each week. There is something both profane and profound about awaiting regularly published content. On the quotidian side, there is the background anticipation of waiting and, when it arrives, there is this little hit of dopamine that resolves the tension or feeling of pre-loss. On a more esoteric side, we get to bear mini witness to the presence of a new communication with someone else across time and space.
   
   For TypeQuote, that delivery is doubled. While I myself am copying out and posting these quotations, the words themselves are written by others. Some are contemporaries. Some have passed. Some are well-known, while others more obscure. I like the idea that readers can find a new quote daily and receive it like a letter from beyond. At some point, I’ll probably have an automated newsletter and an RSS feed.
   
   TypeQuote is also meant to grow over time, compounding like any microblog. I am committed to running this over the next few years — and search, archives and other features will probably be added, at some point. Oh, there is a built-in sharing tool at the bottom-right of posts

Much ado about nothing?

Probably.

TypeQuote is free. It is built to be extremely lightweight, using very little energy, and therefore, the site is light on the environment. It’s accessible to those with visual and other disabilities. It doesn’t track you or set cookies in your browser. It’s easy to navigate — you can arrow-key left and right through the quotes.

Many people helped to make this happen. This site was lovingly developed by Vincent and Filippa of Calotte, a sustainability-minded dev studio based in Québec. It runs on Kirby, a lightweight CMS that keeps things speedy by storing everything as plain text. The typography blends Good Type Foundry’s bike-friendly GTF Rouleuer with Klim’s sophisticated Domaine Text and Grilli Type’s oddball GT Alpina.

If you have a quote you’d like to see featured, please let me know, dear designer. As always, thank you for reading and thank you for your feedback.

Yours,

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Image of the Week

Sometimes words make images, not just describe them. In this stunning example from 820 AD in Northern France, we see a Roman astronomy text from the first century BC applied to a centaur, the sign of Sagittarius. I love how the text carefully undulates through the legs and the tail, giving the half-man, half-horse a feeling of movement walking across the ground of larger text. The text flattens the body while the drawn parts create depth and texture to the centaur. The drawing leaves plenty of white space and plenty to the imagination.

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Quote of the Week

He wrapped himself in quotations — as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.

~ Rudyard Kipling

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Would you do me a favour and share this with a designer or artist friend? I would be grateful. I am trying to get to 1,000 subscribers, after which something else will surely happen!

If you want to subscribe you can do that here, too. Thank you.