In the deep and rich world of self-generated Internet content, there are few things as stark – and as starkly polarizing – as text on a colored background. Is it meme-cheating? Is it boring? Is writing “i hate mondays” in Helvetica over a field of taupe better than posting a picture of a cat hanging off of a tree limb with the same aphorism under her? Now we can find out definitively with Boldomatic.
Founded by Swiss designers Dan Krusi, Raphael Krastev and Steffen Schietinger, the app shares snippets of bold text on colored backgrounds. You can send images to Facebook or Twitter or “embolden” your friends right in the apps own network. Think of it as Instagram without pictures… a textagram, if you will.
This, for example, is the Boldamaticism I just posted:
To create a “Bold,” you simply select a color and type a message. Sharing buttons do the rest. The founders run a small design agency and Steffen created the Boldomatic dream in 2012. They’ve taken no funding and made the entire app in-house.
Steffen describes the philosophy thusly: “No pictures, words only. No rainbow, glitter pooping unicors or endless re-moddeling of typo. One bold font (Suisse BP) and a colored background. That simple. Crafting & sharing statements doesn`t take you longer than issuing a regular tweet or FB status update yet the result is so different(iating).” English isn’t his first language, but you get the idea.
“Our community of writers shares the passion for bold statements,” he said. They’re seeing 500 posts per day on the service so far, a fair number for such a nascent system.
Steffen decided to go bold when he noticed all those photo-sharing services taking off. “How come they all go crazy about pictures these networks what happened to text?” he asked. “There has been no plattform where pictures and text are at the same eye-level and that`s what I wanted to change that.”
The service hit number one in the Swiss App store and they’re slowly entering other markets. They also try to nurture future Boldists.
“We have a healthy gang together and they celebrate Boldomatic as cult in Zurich,” said Steffen. “We stay close to our writers, they shape Boldomatic with us and when we recently launched the Boldomatic webversion we widened the stage for them. Our writers are amazing, you find everything, sarcasm, fun posters, the intellectuals, some steal from the internet, others come up with their own statements, deal with the end of a relationship, write letters to god or Justin Bieber, create pictures with letters, song-writers promoting their lyrics…it’s truly fun exploring.”
“Boldomatic is our baby. A swiss baby,” he said.
Clearly the lads are having fun. The app is available now and an Android version is forthcoming.