Letters, in whatever language/scripts are really glyphs aren’t they? They’re a visual representation of a letter that’s supposed to sound (or not sound) like something that we repeated until we memorized it since birth. All good 🙂
I was thinking of different ways to represent letters…you know, just for fun! Yes, I’m weird like that. But doing it in computer code, that’s repeatable, re-constructible, without any more human interference (other than my initial programming of course).
So, while I was tweaking with Python and Data Science, I took a break to explore this idea. If I take words, a sentence, or even many/unlimited sentences and paragraphs and represent them in numbers, then visually present those numbers, then each of them will be unique. And how will they look?
What does your name look like? It’s a special graphical representation created just for you.
The Design:
Well, it depends on how I chose to represent them…I chose (for now) just 2 methods:
- Â I created a line chart that’s representative of each letter based on their ordinal values (which I extract by calling the OS, and since it’s ASCII table, it’s standard on all platforms/OSs). I used pylab library for charting.
- I do a real-time animation letter by letter of your input connecting node to node, creating a unique image. I used Python’s turtle lib for that.
The Outputs:
Here are some outputs using both methods. NOTICE, how BMW’s “signature” is a perfect trajectory! Coincidence? I think not 😉
Method 1: (graph)
Method 2: (animation)
Animation of my name’s unique signature: (I placed each letter of the name in its unique position and connect previous node, current node, and next nodes)…
See it in action in the Cloud:
Click Run below to start your session, then enter any text to see the graph and also download the output as an image. (Due to limited support of Turtle in the hosted Cloud environment, only the graph version is hosted).
Exercises:Â
Think about your name and adding more unique identifiers (e.g. phone number, birthday, etc.) and design it so it becomes your absolute unique image!
HINT: Just do the same as I did in code, only for additional characters 🙂
