I’ve completed a small side project for the band Taking Back Sunday. It’s an album cover generator.
Inspiration for the project came from the Church Sign Generator. As the name implies, this site lets you generate custom church signs (which tend to yield quite ironic but funny results). The author of this site used image manipulation functions in PHP to generate the signs. Additionally, the author has made his source code available for download, which became an invaluable framework for me to work within.
Most of my work was done in Photoshop. First, I needed to match the font type of the original sign. The font I ultimately used was ‘Wide Latin’ (this was a little too wide, so I shrinked each character horizontally). Next, I made a long, narrow image containing all ASCII chars from 32 to 255, and calculated their individual widths. This was needed for the php script to know the exact pixel placement of each succeeding character on the marquee. The last step involved erasing the existing “Louder Now $1.52″ sign from the marquee, which was done using Photoshop’s clone-stamp tool.
Thanks to the Church Sign Generator, I did very little coding involving the image generation procedure. All that was needed was to plug in some default values (image width and height, char widths, filenames, etc.), and it was good to go.
Leave a comment if you have questions or whatnot.
{ 5 } Comments
Hey, that’s super cool. Good work.
hey
great work
i was wondering if that script with the tbs background could be available somewhere so we all can still use it when the band takes it out of their website
thx in advance!
koala .
Hi Koala,
If the band takes the sign generator down, then I could publish a working copy here, as long as it’s okay with the band. However, I feel this shouldn’t be a concern (at least for a while), especially since it’s useful marketing tool for spreading the band’s name.
Nice job! I saw that site in my referers for a while, and saw the results posted here and there, but didn’t know who did it. Good work, it really came out well. I’m glad you got some use out of the code.
Ryland,
The code worked really well. Thanks for making it available!
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