Signs are neat things. That is, I suppose, why people steal them and then put them in their bedrooms.
Wouldn't it be neat, though, if you didn't have to rely on the government to put clever things on signs? I mean, what if you could make your very own warning sign that, instead of the always witty "STOP", or the hilarious "SPEED LIMIT 25", said "YOWLING PROWLING GEEKS" or "YOBGORGLE" or what have you? And what if you could take that sign and put it somewhere even more clever? Somewhere, for instance, like your bedroom?
If you're looking for big metal signs, I can't help you. The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control devices maybe can, but I can't. It is hard to send metal over the internet.
What I can do is make you a tiny little digital traffic sign, that you can glue onto a webpage or print on a sticker, or just admire in situ. All you need to do is load up signmonger.
See, the signmonger will make a sign for you out of a few keypresses and clicks. It will not demand money. It will not call the police. It will, however, return to you a full color PNG image. It will even make sure that the text is centered, which, believe you me, requires some math.
Actually, the whole thing requires math, trigonometry especially, but that is OK, because the only thing that I can remember from high school trig is soh cah toa, which is enough. The math is combined with the really simple commands included in PHP via the GD library of image functions. Presto! That's all there is, really, along with a traffic sign style font from Larabie Fonts, and another library called Freetype, and some bounding box calculations.
Also, for no reason in particular, I have included an option to create signs with a bizarre alien symbol font that I drew while on a plane that was flying over Greenland. The movie on that flight was unremarkable, and the other passengers looked at my drawings quizzically. I looked out the window at Greenland and then drew some more.
So go make yourself a sign, already.
Wednesday, June 18th, 2003
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