Whomst styles?

Frames, 18th century, French

Truly too busy to be pub­lish­ing even a short blog post at this moment; however, I just came across the loveli­est thing, and I feel compelled!

Look, near the top of this post from Kicks Condor, at the place where he quotes Maya. I’ll just do the same here, and see if I can repli­cate the effect:

This is a “whostyle”: an attempt to carry the ~timbre~ of an author’s voice, in the form of their design sensibility, through into a quotation. It’s the author who defines their whostyle; the quot­ing site just hon­ors it, a frame around their words.

I think the whostyle makes a few arguments. Among them:

• Text is more than a string of char­ac­ter codes. Its design matters, typog­ra­phy and lay­out alike; these things sup­port (or subvert!) its affect, argument, and more.

• The web should be more col­or­ful and chaotic, along nearly every dimension. The past five years have brought a flood of new capabilities, hugely expres­sive — let’s use them!

• Quoting is touchy, and any­thing you can do to cush­ion it with respect and hos­pi­tal­ity is a plus.

Here is an original-ish explanation of the whostyle “protocol”, which isn’t even a protocol, really, just … a sensibility? An invitation? To make the styled quotes on this page, I went look­ing for the appro­pri­ate CSS and jammed it in. Very brittle, not “scalable”: and I celebrate those properties.

I’ll add that even this glanc­ing encounter with whostyles sharp­ens my annoy­ance with Twit­ter, the way it “smooshes” con­tri­bu­tions into uniform, stack­able blocks. But a timeline demands this, right? Maybe; I think a time­line of tweets brim­ming over with typo­graphic vari­a­tion would be tons of fun. Give us a minia­ture grid, let us play Müller-Brockmann!

Platforms built around video sup­port vari­a­tion; your video has to accept a particular frame, sure, but as it unspools, it can be as weird as it wants. It’s a shame that text on Twit­ter isn’t allowed even a faint sug­ges­tion of the same expres­sive latitude. It betrays a par­tic­u­lar view of what text “is”—and while it’s not 100% wrong, I do think it’s … impoverished?

Anyway! Regard­ing whostyles, Kicks writes:

Here’s some more recent elaboration on whostyles from Jacob Hall. I don’t, honestly, think these are going to “catch on”—but what would that even mean on the web of 2021, anyway? And who cares? They are being used by an inter­est­ing coterie; they are open to everyone; they are ges­tures of respect, hos­pi­tal­ity, conviviality. More than enough.

You can also see the logic of whostyles at work on Multiverse, the very inter­est­ing blog­ging plat­form engi­neered by Kicks along with Weiwei Hsu.

Kicks writes:

And of course, I don’t get it as much as Kicks gets it — so here we are, strung out in a line, each of us tak­ing notes from the next, while the peo­ple out front, like Maya and Kicks, push into new (old) dig­i­tal terrain, not to make money or “solve a problem” but … just to see what’s out there! Explo­ration and invention, not to men­tion fun. Leav­ing a trail of bread­crumbs for whoever follows.

August 2021, Oakland