July 22, 2004

Design by serendipity: you supply the text, typoGenerator googles random images and adds effects for interesting results.
posted by sledneck 20 years ago
  • It would be better if the googled images actually had something to do with the text, rather than just a mix of colors, shapes and text. I'd be curious what it would come up with, that way.
  • you know, I know lots of Meta people didn't like it? But I do. Design elitists be damned!
  • From their FAQ:
    how does typogenerator work? the user types some text; typoGenerator searches images.google for the text (italics mine) and creates a background from the found images, using randomly chosen effects. then it places the text, using random effects too.
    You never know what you'll end up with; Google comes up with some strange matches.
  • Yeah, I saw that, and I'm not knocking it at all, but I ran quite a few things through it, and not one photo image I could discern appeared. Some of the results are interesting, but I was entering words like "Bush" and "war" and "monkey", and didn't see any photos at all.
  • I tried this. Got only a few coloured and overlapping letters from a single word in the sentence (ie "strange") I used. These were shoved way off to the upper right of the visual, whole thing on a background of varied grey blocks. result: unsatisfactory, orrelevant, dull
  • Pfui - irrelevant.
  • Too random for a satisfying pixeltoy. There was a free program, called N-Gen, which mixed built-in photos, fonts, graphics and shapes with user-supplied text to 'generate' collages, suitable for posters and CD covers. I loved it; even while, due to legal reasons, never used it on actual client jobs, it was fascinating to watch the permutations, plus it helped to spark compostion ideas.
  • via... Metafilter?
  • via j-walk.