Quotes are all over social media. You’ll spot one within 5 seconds of scrolling through Pinterest and you’re sure to see them in your feed on Instagram as well. Why are quotes so popular? Everyone just loves the little pick-me-up that reading a few words can give them. Whether it’s a relatable, inspirational or motivational Quote, these quotes shared on social media can add a touch of happiness or understanding to someone’s day.

I love making Quote Images myself so I thought I’d share some tips to help you make your quotes stand out! I’m also sharing where to get the best fonts for Instagram and Pinterest quotes.

Which Editing Program?

I highly, highly, highly recommend creating your quote images with Photoshop. If you can’t afford it right now, make use of their 7 day free trial. My tips below are focused mainly around what you can do in the program so I definitely think it’s worth trying.

Other programs you can use with your own fonts are paid versions of Canva and Picmonkey or the free Pixlr Editor.

Pick A Font

Choosing the right font for your quote can make a huge difference as to whether people are going to like or re-post it. The font will need to match up to the vibe of the quote you end up choosing, so for example if you were going to type a sad quote, you wouldn’t choose a bold, vivacious brush script as it just wouldn’t suit.

If you need some new fonts that are perfect for quote images, I have two products you’ll find VERY useful. The Ambition Kit and The Modern Dreamer Collection. These two kits have all the fonts you could need to create quotes in an array of styles. Some of my favourites include:

Find A Quote

I actually decide which quote to use after I’ve chosen a font. Not all quotes will look good in all fonts. Once you’ve picked a font, it might take you typing out a few different quotes before you find one that looks good in the font you’ve chosen.

To find quotes to type out, I’ll scroll through my “Quotes” board on Pinterest, were I’ve shared over 1000 different quote images. If it’s a very generic quote that I’ve seen everywhere, I’ll take it word for word. Otherwise I like to mix it up a bit with my own thoughts. Some of my most popular quote images have been quotes I’ve made up myself.

Use Ligatures

If you want your quote to have that effortless, hand-lettered look, you need to make use of ligatures! Ligatures are where a font has built-in characters that automatically join together. For instance, instead of having ‘at’ where the end of the a awkwardly hits the t, the font creator might include a ligature of at where the a swipes up to the top of the t, making it look more naturally written.

Some fonts have them and some don’t, it depends on how much effort the font creator has put into their font and/or whether ligatures will work with the style of font that it is.

You will need Photoshop in order to use ligatures. They are either automatic, where they appear as you’re typing, or they’re discretionary, where you need to go into the Glyphs panel in Photoshop and manually choose the ligatures you want to add in from the choices.

Use Alternates

Alternates are much like ligatures in the way that they’re extra characters added to a font for you to choose from. Sometimes, a font creator will include more than one version of a character so if you don’t like the character that automatically shows up, you can switch to the alternate.

Alternates aren’t automatic, but they’re very easy to use. After you’ve typed a word, you just need to highlight a character and if there are alternates available for that character, they will pop up above or below to choose from.

I like to use alternates when I’ve typed a quote where particular letters are used often and therefore it ends up looking unnatural because for instance, every ‘t’ looks the same. If you were hand-writing the same quote, all your t’s would look slightly different, and that’s the effect you want to go for when creating digital lettering.

Space It Right

The spacing of the words and/or lines of writing in your quote is so important. You can’t rely on simply typing the quote straight out onto the background and pressing enter for each new line. It’s not going to look good.

Once you’ve type out your quote, try placing the words on different lines to see what looks best. If your quote is something like “Always be kinder than you feel” it could be spaced like:

Another thing you’ll need to do is adjust the line height between lines. When you first hit enter between lines, there will most likely be very large gaps placed automatically. You want to close them in so the lines don’t look abnormally placed far apart.

Once you’ve sorted out the line spacing, there may still be a gap that you notice. Sometimes I will type one of the words as a new layer and remove it from the typed quote, then I can manually place the word where I need to in order to fill the gap.

Now that you’re ready to create some amazing quote images, you might be interested in my top tips for getting them to skyrocket on Pinterest! You can find these tips in The Ambition Kit. I use these tips myself and I find that almost every new quote pic I add to Pinterest hits the hundreds of re-pins within days.

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