Copyright 2010

Unless someone else has thought of this, I hereby copyright this idea... :-)

There are many sites on the web that allow you to create "Ransom Note" style text where each letter you use is presented in a different font, or substituted with a different picture representing that alphabetic character. My idea expands on that a little (but significant) bit.

My idea is to replace whole words (where possible) instead of the individual characters, but by using images of signs from each specific locality. For instance, if someone was to type "Come see our Saturday Performance at 12345 Mainstreet, 10 o'clock am" and tag the location as Detroit-area, each of the words would be replaced with the image of that word from a picture taken somewhere around Detroit. The images would be crowd-sourced like the Human Clock site after being seeded with some Creative Commons images.

• Obviously not all words would be available, especially at the start of the project, so when that happens, the word would be replaced by random letters for each character, though still from local pictures where possible.
• Logos, recognizable signs, etc would all be fodder for the collection.
• The images should be able to be submitted by anyone, but would need to be moderated.
• Submitter should specify which word/letter they are submitting.
• Submitter should be able to cropthe image upon upload so that it isolates the intended area.
• Submitted images should be commonly sized.
• File formats should be restricted.
• Multiples for each would would be allowed and encouraged to provide more randomness.
• A needs list could be presented based on the most common words.
• A needs list could include the ones that are being used that we need to replace with characters instead.
• Users of the site would be allowed to specify a metro area or allow images from the global catalog of images.
• Once presented with a refined image, the user would be able to refresh for a new set of images if desired.
• The final image should be presented to the user as a single image for download.

Any code hackers out there that want to take a shot at this?