BBM-style chat maker

Try it: start from this sample

What you are drawing

The BBM-style look is a phone screen from the era of physical keyboards. In the dark scheme it is a charcoal background with a contact header and a status line, and square-cornered bubbles carrying the time. A light scheme also exists.

Your own bubbles get a single letter in the corner: D for delivered, R for read. ChatsRat is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by the original service, which has ended or changed. The look is original artwork and uses no logos or sounds.

Setting it up

Switch read receipts on, because the D and R letters are the signature of this look. The last message can show D while earlier ones show R, which instantly tells the viewer that something has not been opened yet.

This look has no online status, so show absence through the messages themselves: a gap in replies, a question left hanging. The header can show typing while someone is writing. The look is on the Standard plan.

Where it fits

It suits period pieces, throwback clips, school or workplace stories set in the keyboard-phone years, and design talks about how messaging screens changed. The square bubbles also make it easy to tell apart from rounded modern looks in a side-by-side slide, and the dark scheme gives them strong contrast against a light slide background.

Tips

• Make the final bubble a D so a viewer sees at once that nobody has opened it.
• Keep sentences short, because phone-keyboard typing rewarded brevity, and the bubbles are narrow.
• Use capitals and punctuation the way thumbs did: simple, with few emoji.
• Choose the dark scheme for night scenes and the light scheme for daytime ones.
• For a before and after slide, place it beside a modern look with the same sample text.
• Add a caption that says the conversation is simulated, and keep every name and detail invented.

Questions