Moo Sticker Bubblifier

Posted by Neil Crosby on September 9, 2007 05:20 PM

When moo.com brought out their stickers a couple of months ago, the ones from their sample book that I was most impressed with were the little speech bubble stickers with the oh so very “web 2.oh” phrases printed on them. Unfortunately, you weren’t able to make up similar ones on the site unless you wanted to create them yourself in PhotoShop first.

No matter, I thought - that’ll be a nice little wizard that they’ll be sure to add to the site pretty quickly since I can’t be the only person who thinks that the speech bubbles are cool. That didn’t happen though, so In the spirit of all things web, I decided to make my own.

The Moo Sticker Bubblifier that I’ve come up with is very simple - you give it some text (on multiple lines if you’d like to span multiple lines on the sticker), say what font and colour you want, and you’ll be magically presented with an image you can save and then use with moo to make some stickers.

The are a couple of things I’m fairly pleased with about this hack. First off, the URLs used for the created images are nicely hackable, and look like they’re just any old image even though they’re being produced by PHP as and when they’re requested. Secondly, the wizard will dynamically resize the text you give to get you a best fit. So, if you wanted a sticker that said “WTF?” then the text would be larger than if you wanted a sticker that said “I alone am best!”. Currently all lines of text on a sticker are always the same size, but I might have a fiddle later so that you can choose to have differing text sizes within a sticker if it’s something that people want.

So, there you go. What are you waiting for? Get out there and make some speech bubbles!

comments (1) | write a comment | permalink | View blog reactions