Quote Card
A square, image-based social-media graphic in which a pull-quote is set in large type over a photograph or plain background.
A quote card is a purpose-built social-media image that presents a short quotation as a graphic. The convention emerged on Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram in the early 2010s and became a default publisher tactic on Facebook shortly afterwards: publications discovered that a well-set pull-quote outperformed a plain link post by a wide margin.
The form has settled into a rough grammar: a square (1:1) or portrait (4:5) image, a short quotation in the centre in a display face, an attribution in smaller type below, and — for publishers — a logo or handle in the corner. Colour, photograph, and font choices identify the outlet as clearly as any masthead.
Quote cards changed how editorial teams choose quotations. A line that reads well in a five-hundred-word article may not fit in a square image; a line that survives radical decontextualisation, on the other hand, may be worth pulling for the card even if it is only a subordinate point in the piece. Editors now think in two channels simultaneously.
Common mistake: cropping a quotation for the card in a way that changes its meaning. The card is a public artefact and travels far beyond the article it was pulled from; if the compressed version misrepresents the source, the damage is durable and, in the age of screenshots, almost impossible to correct.
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any. — Alice Walker”
Keep reading the glossary
A short, eye-catching quote lifted from an article and displayed in large type for emphasis.
A short, image-anchored quote in the modern viral sense — quickly shared, easily altered, and prone to misattribution.
A short, vivid extract from a longer speech, designed to be repeated by news media.
A short phrase, usually attached to a brand or work, that sits under the name to condense its promise.