Playing With Image & Text Generators

Yes, I know. I'm tackling the Things out of order again. (Hangs head in shame.) What can I say? I like to play. And image generators are a lot of fun to play with... Don't believe me? Check out what I've been up to lately...

Create your own beautiful word cloud at Wordle . Plug in any text you like, a delicious username, or the url of a page with an RSS feed & away you go! The only downside to Wordle is that there's no easy way to save the code for your creation or the image itself--screenshots are your only option. (Hello MS Paint, my old friend, how've you been?)

Here's my first attempt at Wordle art, created using Neil Gaiman's short story "I Cthulhu."



Wordle's awesome. It lets you change the appearance of the layout of your cloud (this one's half and half with straighter edges), the color scheme, & the font. And boy are there some exotic fonts (Grilled Cheese, anyone?) to choose from.

Here's another, created using tags from my bookmarks at http://delicious.com/holyexplodingshark:


Seeing as how any Wordle image is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution License, Wordle's got some neat programming & publicity possibilities for the library... (And yes, I actually followed the link about licensing--so long as we give credit where credit is due, e.g. the source of the text & the program used to generate the image, we could even make money off of our wordle art! How cool is that?) Me, I want to make up some manga & graphic novel posters for the teen area...

And speaking of manga...here's a WordHeart I made using some of my favorite manga and anime titles:

You can create WordHearts of your own over at http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/WordHearts/. WordHearts is yet another site that has no built in tools to save your image--screenshots are your one and only option. I really must learn to take better screen captures. I hear Firefox has some great plug-ins...

Here's an eyechart I created using Custom Eye Chart Maker over at http://www.eyechartmaker.com/:

I was pretty disappointed in this--I wanted room for more text. And it took me a while to realize that I didn't need to put spaces between words... (It also made me wonder why if eye charts are this easy to generate, why does my opthamologist insist on showing me the same chart for both my right and left eyes? I mean, my short term memory isn't so bad that I can't remember the line from one eye to the next. But I digress.)

I had much more fun following a link from Custom Eye Chart Maker to Custom Road Sign over at http://www.customroadsign.com/. This appealed to my sense of humor:

I'll say this for both the road sign and eye chart makers, though--they're the first image generators I've played with today that allow me to right click and save the image directly to my PC. Flash is fun, but it's not easy to save.

It was suggested by TPTB that we explore a few "Discovery Resources," the better to get a handle on image generators. I'd already spent a considerable amount of time playing over at FD Toys (see my previous posts RE: fun with Flickr) so I thought I'd check out LetterJames. The following were created using the E-Card Service, right clicking on the finished image, and saving to my PC.






(Don't mind me. I'm having a Stephen King/Stanley Kubrick flashback here. It'll pass. Just give it a moment.)

Honestly, I found LetterJames to be disappointing. Yes, the images are exceedingly easy to save--three cheers for right-click save-as! Yes, it allows you to superimpose your own text over a gallery of 300 images (a huge plus for those of us who don't have digital cameras) to create cards, calendars, posters, and more. The AlphaPictures technology is really neat--it makes your text appear as skywriting, letters in the sand, spray painted grafitti, etc., whatever's appropriate to the image. Just like this:



Can't fault the end product at all. But the process...well, I've got a few complaints about that.

For starters, I reallly would've appreciated a search feature for the gallery. Some of the categories are huge, and I really didn't want to waste my time browsing through 20+ screens. And speaking of wasting time... In order to create each and every image, you're required to type in a super secret security code! I hate those things. I fail utterly at those things. I really don't understand why you're asked for a code just to create. To purchase? Sure. To send? Ditto. But just to make the image? I wasted a lot of time trying to correctly enter codes. (Although not as much time as I wasted setting up my blog...blogger's security code check wouldn't take a single thing I typed. Honestly, I'm not that bad of a typist or a speller. Seriously.)

I also encountered a number of "error during the image processing" messages of doom whilst creating an image AFTER I'd successfully entered the security code and proved I wasn't a 'bot. Sometimes I could successfully "process" the image after repeated tries. Others I abandoned as a lost cause. I'd be interested in hearing if anyone else had similar experiences--maybe it's just my dinosaur of a PC or my DSL's speed.

Another problem I ran into at LetterJames was that with some images, the placement of text on the image had little (if anything?!) to do with the order in which the text was typed into the generator. My street sign took some playing with. Despite all the manga I read, I still think in terms of left to right, top to bottom. The image generator doesn't consistently follow this pattern. In this example, it seemed to equate text entry with the SIZE of the text in the final image, not its vertical position. Most prominent (the middle sign)--came from the the 1st & top text box. 2nd most prominent (the one at an angle at the TOP of the image)--the 2nd box in the middle. Smallest--the 3rd.


The ransom note below is another example. To create the image, I could place text in up to 8 fields. I only had enough text to fill 4...so I filled in the 1st four and the 1st 4 only. And retrieved a blank image. Filling boxes 5-8, OTOH, created this warning to any hooligans with designs on despoiling my library's manga collection:

Who knows what would have happened if I'd filled in all 8 fields?

The amount of text that could be entered in a text field varied from "card" to "card." Some were seemingly infinite, others not...as you'd discover when you ran up against the wall of the box at 60 miles an hour. Still others would take scads of text in the box...only to then "hide" it behind the picture.

I really think this site could be improved with some instructions. I expect a commercial site that's trying to sell a service (photo albums, calendars, etc.) to be a bit more user-friendly. Of course, the e-cards were free... I love the special effects, but the site required more trial & error & effort than I'm entirely comfortable with.

Exercising my google-fu, I went hunting for more text & image generators.

I'm fascinated by the typoGenerator. You input text and the generator performs a google image search matching whatever you typed and mashes whatever it finds into something that, according to the FAQ, isn't necessarily readable but "looks nice." It's random, but you can elect to save certain elements (style, colors & background)as you experiment. Here are a few of my experiments/artworks, generated using the tags from my delicious account:













Hit the jackpot with this nifty little collection of links to text generators: http://educationalsoftware.wikispaces.com/Text+Generators! It's where I grabbed the 3D Text Maker that is (supposed to) be animating "Welcome to Thing #10!" at the top of this entry. (Why isn't it animating, why? It should be sliding endlessly to the left.)

And The Graffiti Creator:

And the Logo Maker (in honor of the upcoming Trek movie):

(Hmm. The code button doesn't work for Logo Maker...and no matter what "size" I generate the image in on the screen, if I right click save I just get this itty bitty logo. Which doesn't show off the lovely twinkly stars of deepest outer space the way I'd like it to. Maybe this is a job for...print screen! Or maybe I'll just let it go.)

And finally, because it wouldn't be my blog without another gratuitous mention of "the z-word" (as the niece & nephew have come to call it), I present...Spelling with Zombies!


You could learn a lot from a zombie.