Typography and Text Based Art

This week we learned about typography and text-based art, which is the technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. Did you ever have anybody wish you "Happy Birthday" on Facebook and there was a bunch of characters all put together to make a picture of balloons or something like that? Honestly, that stuff kind of gets on my nerves a bit. Who has time to make stuff like that? The simplest part of this is just like that, but we did go on to learn more advanced and nicer ways to use text as art. There are several websites that allow you make text-based art, and I'm going to show you some examples of them.

The simplest form we learned about was ASCII art. ASCII is short for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Basically, this program uses characters from the English alphabet to make pictures out of characters, this was used a lot back when computers were not able to do a lot of graphics and image editing software was available. I wonder if any of my other classmates besides me are actually old enough to remember this...

This image was made with GlassGiant.com, I used a picture you are probably familiar with, my Drug Corner shot from Urban Landscapes. I thought it would be perfect for this application since I wanted to keep with the dark and dingy theme.<br><br>

For the following three pictures, I used TEXT-IMAGE.com to alter my Rock Grid picture in three different ways. The first one ASCII, the second was HTML which allows you to specify the characters I wanted to use, and finally the third was Matrix - yeah, like the movie.

The next application we learned about was Tagxedo, which was probably my favorite program this week. It creates word clouds or tag clouds which are visual representations of text which may include additional imagery. I, of course, chose a selfie that I took the other day (I think I mentioned before that I am the queen of all selfies - even though this one isn't that focused, I like it because it kind of shows how I feel about this week!). I used some words that I feel describe myself. I like this program a lot, you can use different themes to change the colors and feeling of the photograph. This one is great too, because it has a save option, which makes it easier than doing a bunch of screen shots. Here's the original and what I created in Tagxedo:

Finally I used Textorizer to create a few different pictures, this one also had three options to choose from: Textorizer, Textorizer 2 and Excoffizer. Textorizer could be great, but man is it a pain to use, I kept timing out and getting script errors, luckily, my instructor warned us ahead of time. Her advice was to have patience - as you probably know by now, patience is NOT one of my virtues.

The first picture I used Textorizer - this is a shot I took the other day in the middle of my bike ride. I was able to pick my own text so I used words like "autumn" "serene" "cycling" and a few more... Here's the original and the Textorizer'd version of it.

 

 A couple of weeks ago I got to go into the Toledo Museum of Art after hours with another class. I have to say, it's absolutely amazing to go in there, in the dark with no crowds. I wish I could get locked inside! Here's a painting by Frank Stella - I love this shot, the whole museum is dark and just this fabulous painting was illuminated.

Finally, for Excoffizer I used a picture I snapped of my dog trying to get my attention while resting on my other dog. I'm actually proud of this one, as Excoffizer has some amazing options to use, but I didn't take it too far this time, which I tend to do with any type of altering/Photoshopping of pictures. I cut back the opacity so you could still get the orange of Murray's fur - I didn't want to lose him as Gili is the focus. Enjoy! If you liked any of this, or even if you didn't, feel free to comment below.