2011 – 2014 · an app for iPhone

A fast and simple way to share your message.

Quipio turned words and photos into little pieces of typographic art — quips — made to be shared. Its work is preserved here as a record of when typography got a send button.

2× featured globally by Apple on the App Store

Top 50 App Store rank reached in 12 countries

500 characters was all a quip needed

8 ways to send one flying, from Instagram to Weibo

The idea

Everyone had become a photographer. Words deserved a turn.

By 2011 the smartphone had put a camera, a darkroom and an audience in everyone's pocket. A photo could be shot, filtered and shared in under a minute — but the things people most wanted to say still traveled as plain, unloved text.

Quipio's bet was that words deserved the same craft. It made typography as effortless as a photo filter: type what you mean, tap the words that matter, choose a style, and out comes a quip — a quote, a joke, a recipe, a declaration — designed like something worth keeping.

Get a thought. Make it beautiful. Send it flying.

The red kite was the whole philosophy in one mark: something light, handmade and joyful, released to travel farther than you could throw it. Quips landed in the app’s own streams — Fresh, For You, Featured, Best Quips, and the food-only Om Nom Nom — where people liked, commented, and collected them into stories of their own.

The film

Self-expression, simplified — in sixty-two seconds

The original promo film, published August 2014.

How it worked

From thought to quip in four taps

1Start with anything

A photo from the camera or library, a built-in image search when you needed the perfect Asimov portrait — or nothing but text on a clean page.
2Write, then point at what matters

Up to 500 characters. Then tap individual words to highlight them — Quipio’s styles knew to give those words the spotlight.
3Pick a style

Typographic themes for pure text; overlay styles for photos; and filters named after kites — Allure, Burn, Dream, Autumn. Every choice previewed live with your own words.
4Send it flying

Into Quipio’s streams, or out to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Weibo, SMS, email and the photo library — one quip, every audience.

Eight sample quips: painted art, a camera cake, orchids, clouds, a gorilla, Yoda, Morgan Freeman, and painted stripes — each carrying styled text

Sample quips, from Quipio’s own showcase.

The community

Streams, quipped daily

Fresh for the newest, For You for the personal, Best Quips for the keepers, Om Nom Nom for lunch. Quips were liked, commented on, shared onward — and collected, like a scrapbook of things worth saying.