Typographic artwork is very popular at the moment with all sorts images being created, from maps to movie posters. They look really cool but don’t you just wish that you could do it yourself using any picture you want?
Wordify brings creating these types of graphics to your Mac in a very simple to use app that will convert any image you want into a typographic piece of art. It gives you beautiful results, and actually looks great doing so.
Word Art, for Real
Wordify lets you drag images directly to the main window to start converting into typographic artwork
As soon as you launch Wordify, you’re presented with a small window onto which you can drag an image. There’s a selection of templates to get you started, ranging from shapes to animals. Wordify works best when using portraits of people or images shot on clear backgrounds as you get the best effect from it but in my testing I was able to get some pretty good results from photos on multicoloured backgrounds.
If you’ve not got any pictures to use, Wordify includes some templates to get you started and see how the app works
The app is sparse when it comes to controls and only has three button on display once an image is loaded, one of them for deleting the image. The other buttons start the text rendering and provide access to the settings.
In Your Own Words
Once you’ve selected an image to use, you’re then able to customise some of the text options
There aren’t many options in the way of settings but what you can customise is useful nonetheless. The default text used is, rather fittingly, “Here’s To The Crazy Ones” but can be changed to any text you wish. Only unique words are rendered so if you paste in your favourite quote and it contains the same word a few times, you’re not going to see it more than others. So, there’s no way to get a phrase — even just two words — to be guaranteed to show up together.
You can specify the text to use and Wordify will randomly place the words with varying sizes throughout the image
You’re also able to customise the font, size and colour of the text generated. A nice touch is the option to completely randomise the font used if you’re not too interested or would like to see what your image would look like in different fonts. I like this option as you get to mix up all the different fonts that you have available, resulting in some really great looking artwork.
You can see a preview of your image being generated within the app’s window once you start the conversion
Instead of just outputting an image for you to use, Wordify shows you a preview of the artwork being generated and, once finished, results in a PDF that’s approximately 10×8 inches. Not only can you print it at home but because it’s a PDF, there’s no loss in quality so you can scale it up to almost any size you wish. If you think the artwork is truly special, you’ll find no shortage of online printing companies that can print your typographic piece onto canvas or large poster formats.
Room For Improvement
Whilst you can pick any colour you’d like for the text, you’re limited to just using some RGB sliders without being able to specify an exact colour
The app does have one or two weak points that are worth mentioning. Although you can specify any colour you want for your text, there’s no colour picker or even palette. Colours are controlled by a red, green and blue slider but with no feedback on the exact colour you’ve chosen. If you’ve got a very specific colour you’d like to use then you’ll need to have a keen eye to make sure it’s the same.
Some fonts (such as Wingdings) are symbol fonts that contain no readable characters so you’ll often find random symbols appear within your artwork. I’d like to see the option to specify a number of fonts to use rather than everything in my font library.
Generated PDFs are also just opened, in my case, with Preview. Whilst Wordify generates the PDF, the actual saving and management of it is done within your preferred PDF viewer. I find this a little counterintuitive as the file that’s generated is a temporary PDF, you need to save (or move) it using Preview if you want to keep it. It would be a little easier if the app simply saved the PDFs to a folder rather than sent them to Preview first.
You can alter the colour and fonts used, creating some remarkable pieces of work
Conclusion
Wordify is an interesting app and despite it’s lack of customisable options is quite fun to use. Not every image you use will come out great but once you get used to the types of images to use, you’ll have plenty of fun. The fact that Wordify saves artwork as lossless PDF files means that you can create some truly great posters and have them printed to put up on your walls.
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