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
Commenting is easier and faster when you're logged in!
Recommended for you
TypeTalk: The Case of the Mysterious Missing Fonts
Q. I’ve noticed some strange font behavior in some of my documents. Sometimes un...
Using the Fade Command in Photoshop
Ever wish you could partially undo a change you made to an image in Photoshop? Y...
dot-font: Fun with the Push Pin Legacy
dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer Jo...