Postcard Generator
This is a small program to take an image file and create many randomly positioned and oriented postcard images from it, such that one can print them out as postcards. When recombined, the postcards can be used to generate a collage of the original image.
I did this as a thank-you present for my friend Quinn, who introduced me to Dr. Who. The idea was to take an image like this:
...then make a bunch of randomly oriented postcards, like so...
...print them out on pages like this:
...and reconstruct the postcards as a collage.
I also took it a little further, print up the postcards and taking them to Borderlands Cafe. There, I asked people if they would write about their Dr. Who experiences -- what the show meant to them, or something about their experience with Dr. Who. I got a variety of great responses. These are just a few:
Finally, I sent them, a few each day, to Quinn, who was delighted to receive them and put them all up on her wall!
So that you can make postcards of your own, I've made the code open source, creative commons attribution license. You can download the latest version from github, http://github.com/lotze/postcard. Enjoy!
I also gave a five minute talk about this at Noisebridge's Five Minutes of Fame on Thursday, May 20th. You can download the slides for that presentation here or see the video here (I start at 10 minutes in, and keep to my five minutes pretty exactly).