Cento

Composing a poem in Cento

Inspiration

Cento the name comes from the Latin word for "patchwork garment". It is a literary work collaged entirely from other authors’ verses or passages. Our program lets you catch your inspirations while your browse the internet and arrange words into your beautiful poem.

What it does

Cento comes with a chrome extension and a webpage. While you browse the internet and stumble upon a sentence you like, you can select it, then drag it into the plugin, or simply right-click and select "Send to Cento". And in the webpage, you'll see your selected text pieces in a panel to the left. Feel free to arrange them however you like to the canvas: cut up sections you like, bin them if you don't need them, and change the style from various styles & palettes.

How we built it

The app is first wireframed with pen on paper, then this turns into a higher fidelity model in Figma. Based upon that, by the help of gen-AI models like Codex and Claude, through iterative playtesting, we managed to Cento to inspire people to dive into their artistic sides.

Challenges we ran into

How to integrate the browser extension and web app, how to transfer data in between them.
Coding process.
Playtesting with a literature student at Pitt revealed an additional functionality we introduced: providing the user with a prompt they can follow (if they want).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Implemented the drag and drop text feature with typography type detection.
Coming up with the colors combinations and using textures to create a nice looking UI.