Whomst styles the whostyles?

I love this idea… and who better to introduce it to me than Robin Sloan, writer, note-maker, and ambassador of Keep the Blogosphere Weird in his note Whomst styles?:

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.

The idea of giving each personality a little speech bubble to represent their creative identity is lovely, and reminds me of Microsoft Comic Chat. Let's keelhaul tiktok and bring back altcomix-inspired IRC chats!

Robin frankly didn't make this easy at all, with his subtly changing background and header colors¹. Jacob Hall made this easier with a lovely reference to all: revert, and the resulting conversation in his indie-web comments is a sort of charming internet House of Leaves, which Robin echoes:

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!

Hear hear! I may very well try to make my own whomstyle.css... just for giggles.

Whomst styles? - www.robinsloan.com