Thing #6: Image generators

The task for Thing #6 is the use of 3 different image generators: Letterjames, Big Huge Labs and Cooltext. I hadn't heard of any of these before.

Letterjames appears to be a free and simple equivalent to services such as Moonpig.com, allowing you to insert your own text into a variety of stock images, such as this:

I can't see I can see much reason for doing this, full stop, but it's especially irrelevant to me as an archivist because what I don't lack is a selection of images.

As far as I could tell, only one category let you upload your own images (picture-in-picture) which again, I can't see of being much use as the stock images you can load your photo in to (a smartphone, a billboard etc) are unlikely to be of much use to me.

On to Bighugelabs.

At first glance, this website seems to offer more functionality as it allows you to link directly to you flickr account and derive content from there. Again, most of the functions are more geared towards making your own calendars, doing silly things on facebook etc but the most useful tools are the caption generator:



or the mosaic maker, for creating very quick groups of photographs. However the latter was very limited in how it would let you arrange them, and I would be surprised if there weren't others out there with better functionality. Ultimately, this website is very much aimed at the home market and there isn't a great deal of use professionally that I could see with it, other than the caption generator. But it's useful to know about that.

The final website is CoolText.

I'm afraid my heart sunk when I saw this. the website design looks like 1997, the very concept of putting words into exotic fonts all seems a bit old-hat and generally this website looks like something I might have used when I had a geocities homepage. I did have a go with it but couldn't make anything that didn't look deeply, deeply naff. However, this was my laughable attempt.

This isn't a service I'll be using again as I think it's too gimmicky and would very quickly put off a web-savvy audience from spending time on your website.