a picture is worth a thousand words

Che Guevara

A Che Guevara portrait based in the photo taken in 1960 by Alberto Korda. It is probably one of the most used icons in the world with a lots of variations in differents sizes and formats… and I want to have my own version of it.

The words are the most used words of Guevara’s book “Diarios de Motocicleta”.

Download PDF JO-D-100421-Che (545kB).

You probably don’t care about this… but I want to show you part of my image creation process.

At the beginning, I usually obtain the text information (like lyrics, books, or quotes) through the web, just with a web browser. Then I usually choose the seed image from Wikipedia or Google Images. The image always need a manual modification. For the text I also have my own tool, based in the snowball stemmer, that let me count words and generates an analysis file.

With the seed image and the analysis file, I let my main tool (I called it IaT) to take care of the spread process. It is always the hard part because requires a lots of tryouts till I get something usefull, and it is a highly time consuming process.

After the spread process, I have the result and then the fun start… I made a post-production image modification tool that let me change a lot of things like add random colors, invert words colors, change the word position randomly, increase size, drop shadow, etc… It is very usefull because I could give it to the final client and let choose by himself. Take a look at the tool shell.

It let me try differents options and fine tuning my images. For example with the Che image I did a lot of different versions before select the final one. Look at some of them.

Do you agree with my final decision?. By the way, if you like another one drop me a message and I will also post it. Perhaps you think that the words are not the right ones, send me your list and I will consider a remake…

See you!.

2 Responses to “Che Guevara”

  1. Troy Morvant says:

    I absolutely love this image. I would be very interested in understanding more about the technology, and if it could possibly be adapted for real-time generation some art installation ideas I am working on.

  2. […] The most commonly used words of the Che Guevara book “Diarios de Motocicleta”. […]