Top Draw Moo Cards
March 10th, 2009
I have needed some business cards for a while. I wanted a nice distinctive design — but I’m a programmer, not a designer. I spent a few days over the last week exploring options and struggling to come up with a nice design.
Several friends suggest that I give Moo Cards a try. The nifty thing about Moo Cards is that every one can be different. So this gave me an idea: Why not generate the graphics for each one algorithmically?
I was already doing this for backgrounds on my Mac using Google Top Draw – an open source program that uses Javascript and Apple’s Core Image to generate some very nice random images. The scripts can be easily customized and there is good documentation. It’s very fun to play with.
Here is my Top Draw script for generating Moo Card images. It outputs a new PNG file sized 1040×696 pixels (roughly 300dpi) in the user’s Library/Application Support/Google/TopDraw directory everytime it is run. Here’s an example of the output:
Just change the desired ‘name’ and ‘fontName’ at the top of the file. Run it a bunch of times, delete the images that aren’t the best, and upload the rest to the moo.com website to start an order. If you want to get creative, read the docs and examples, and customize the Javascript.
It’s a bit of a hack, since Top Draw is only designed for generating desktop backgrounds. To export to a file, I had to render everything into a single layer and export that to disk.
I made a really short (2 minute) screencast walkthrough on how to run the script.
For the record, Moo Cards has a similar feature on their website called ‘textomatic‘ which also can randomly generate text designs (just not as wild).
6 Comments Add your own
1. Michael | March 10th, 2009 at 11:05 pm
So when will you start handing out your psychedelic cards? And do they come with “extras”? :D
2. jim | March 10th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
I’m waiting for them to be delivered. I’ll update the post when I get ‘em.
3. Dethe Elza | March 11th, 2009 at 9:12 am
Jim, since are on a Mac, you could also try NodeBox, which is a) Python, b) extemely well documented, c) has tons of examples, and d) focussed on producing PDFs (although it can easily produce PNG or other image types, movies, etc.).
For those who are not using a Mac, one of the best bets is Processing, which is similar to NodeBox (NodeBox was originally based on Processing), but more focussed on producing animated applets, and the syntax is based on Java rather than Python or Javascript.
Both NodeBox and Processing have tons of add-on libraries as well, which let you get really wild. Processing hooks up to Arduino for real-world inputs and outputs. NodeBox hooks up to WordNet for expert language processing and you can turn all the text into raw paths which can be manipulated for really wild effects.
4. jim | March 11th, 2009 at 10:16 am
Good links Dethe!
5. Dan Waylonis | April 14th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Glad you like Top Draw and good to see that you’re using it for something frivolous and fun! :-)
6. David Drucker | August 31st, 2009 at 11:07 pm
I ran the script but didn’t get any rendered files. Is there something I need to uncomment or change?
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed