Word Grain guide

Overview

Word Grain builds a picture out of your own words: a word mosaic of small coloured tags, set in rows like type, in a few flat tones like a screen print.

A young face with white curls and round dark glasses, built from slanted word tags that interlock in fine rows, cream and grey on black
Frost in Slant tags and 120 rows, its colours found in the picture.

First the picture is read: its levels are stretched so the darkest and lightest one per cent become black and white (auto levels, percentile clip), and its features are sharpened a little so eyes and mouths keep their shape.

Then its colours are grouped. Every point is placed in Oklab, where equal steps look equal to the eye, and k-means finds the picture's own groups, started far apart by k-means++. Each group's centroid becomes one ink, and the inks are spread from dark to light (lightness spread) so neighbouring tones always read apart.

Each point takes the ink of its group, and a majority filter clears the lone specks, so the picture becomes a few flat tones.

Each row is cut at every tone boundary into tone runs, and each run is filled with the next of your words. A word tag is as wide as its word, measured from the font's advance widths, and the tags in a run are stretched to fill it exactly (stretch to fill), so every edge of the picture falls between two tags.

Save it as a PNG 4000 pixels on its long side, as an SVG that keeps every tag and word as vector, or the build as an MP4. It is all drawn in your browser on a canvas; nothing is uploaded.

Open Word Grain Start here

In this guide

  1. StartWhat you need and your first poster in five steps.
  2. Every controlEvery control in the panel, one line each.
  3. Three looksThree posters and the settings that made them.
  4. Keep your workThe PNG, the SVG and the build as an MP4.
  5. KeysEvery shortcut, and what each one does.
  6. HelpWhat to do when something goes wrong.

It opens on Elder, a portrait, with the elders' words: Thatha, Paati, Nana, Nani, Abuela, Oma and the rest.

It works in any recent browser, on a computer or a phone. It needs no graphics card features.

A picture written in kanji chosen by their ink is Ink Weight; words grown out of a noise field are Glyph Weave.