WordArter

Inspiration

Initially when we saw the theme of Durhack is composition, we immediately as a group decided on doing a project based around creativity, specifically to do with art and music.

Matthew was inspired by collage applications like PicCollage and building a bigger image using the images, as group we thought it was a good idea however it was missing that personal connection. At this point Rithvik thought of the idea of creating album covers using words as a form of WordArt.

What it does

What this program essentially does is takes in as input an album cover and lyrics from songs from the album and generate the album cover using lines from the songs.

How we built it

For this project, we were mainly working with Python for the back-end using libraries like PIL, numpy and most importantly the WordCloud library. This library allows you to create word art given an image and text that should populate the image.

For the frontend, we made use of HTML, CSS with the use of TypeScript and Vue. The front-end is a website that takes the inputs needed for the back-end, which is an image and a set of lyrics and communicates with the back-end to return the image.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we ran into immediately is to do with the library WordCloud. The WordCloud library is not a commonly used library so we were struggling to find examples on how to use it properly. One such situation we had is that the library just used colours from a list for the words in the art but for us we needed the colours from the actual album cover to be the same colours on the text, which was a challenge and we had to write our own script to do this properly.

The other problem we had is that, for certain albums with words in the album cover the word art was struggling to replicate words in the title. There was a lot of fine tuning happening in this stage, we needed to make sure the text in the word art wasn't too small or too large.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of ourselves for working with libraries that we haven't interacted with much, specifically the WordCloud library, we are also really impressed with our idea and think it's something everyone in the world is able to get excited about and something everyone would love to see.

What we learned

We learned a lot on this project, especially how to work as a group on a tight deadline.

What's next for WordArter

For us, we want to do better with the artwork so it looks better and better, as mentioned, it doesn't work well for some albums due to colour schemes in the album, so our next steps would be improving what we have already done.