You’ve seen images that are made up of hundreds (or thousands) of smaller photos, right? Now there’s a new text version of the concept. Textify.it is a free web service and a $.99 app for iOS devices. For either version, you supply the imagery and tweak some settings, click a button, and bam! You have a new image made entirely out of different-colored text.
There are a few drawbacks for those of you planning to use the results in professional projects: While you can save your creation, it will be a 72 ppi PNG file. Not exactly suitable for most print projects. Also, fine details are lost in translation, so many photos aren’t the best choice for Textify.it. One more caveat: Developer Hakim El Hattab says that the free Web service works only in Chrome and Firefox 4.
Caveats aside, Textify.it is a lot of fun to play with. You can mess around with a bevy of presets; apply black and white or sepia filters; set the background to be a color or another image; choose the character set and quantity; make each character larger or smaller; select a font family from a lamentable list (Arial, Comic Sans MS, Helvetica, monospace, and Times New Roman); and change the font’s weight.
This is the online interface:
And here’s a Textified image, reduced to fit in this website’s grid:
This article was last modified on December 14, 2022
This article was first published on June 10, 2011
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