Friday, July 22, 2011

TARDIS Word Cloud

I've been working on this for a long time, whenever I had a few spare minutes: An image of the TARDIS made entirely out of Doctor Who episode titles.

I used as many episode titles as I could squeeze in, but there wasn't enough room to use them all, so your favorite title may not be in there. I kept track of the ones I used, so hopefully none of them are in there twice. If anyone sees any duplicates, let me know. 

Note that I didn't use one of those fancy word tag programs; this was all laid out entirely by hand. Actually it was kind of relaxing, in a zen-like way. Sort of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

The "Title TARDIS" is actually the second one I did. For the first version I made a TARDIS shape out of the names of the Doctor's enemies. I like this version, but after a while I started wondering why I was doing it. The Doctor is a hero, so why was I building his TARDIS out of villain names? It didn't make much sense to me.

I guess you could argue that these are all the foes he's vanquished, but it bugged me enough that I decided to start over from scratch and go the title route.

Not sure what I'm going to do with it. If there's enough interest, I might offer it as a t-shirt design. Here's what it would look like on a shirt.
 
This is a vector drawing, drawn all in InDesign.

21 comments:

  1. i would totally buy one of these as a t-shirt. i'm a medium/large :)

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  2. I would buy one for sure. Typographic illustration + Dr Who = 2 of my nerdy obsessions combined. Would not be able to resist.

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  4. Hell - I don't even wear printed t-shirts and I'd probably wear this!

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  5. No mention of the Happiness Patrol or the Kandyman on either of them. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, THP was one of my favorite Doctor Who stories, and the Kandyman was one of my favorite monsters. On the other hand, most Doctor Who fans hate The Happiness Patrol/the Kandyman, so...

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  6. I would by a print ... or a t-shirt. Have you thought about opening a red bubble shop?

    http://www.redbubble.com/

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  7. Tomas Lamp: Last time I looked, if threadless buys your shirt you get either a lump sum of cash or credit towards shirts. It's been a while since I looked into their business model. This shirt might scare them away since it's based on a copyrighted property.

    Thanks, Chandra!

    Gordon: As I mentioned, there just wasn't room to include every title.

    DangerGirl: Never heard of redbubble. I'll have to check them out.

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  8. Hey' ..y'all playin' TARIDS NOW?
    COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!
    We like TARANTINO ID'S ,too.
    How ' bout DASSOW?
    You gonna talk PLO , TOO?
    REALLY.....cooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool.
    LOGBOOKS?
    We know NUTHIN' ' bout them !
    Unless it got todo with BILL CLINTON?
    WASHINGTON- OREGON- EARL?
    Oh yeah...we heard it is ROB LOWE' S ZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO?
    And SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIPS?
    AndPT BOATSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS?
    Who gets the SUBS?

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  9. omg i would SO buy this if it was a shirt!
    great stuff!

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  10. Hi - me again - miss me? I meant to mention - since you thought Threadless might not be so hip to the using of trademarked brands - here's a site that amalgamates a collection of daily shirt sites and many of them laugh in the face of trademarking. Tonnes of Who, Firefly, Star Wars etc type stuff.

    http://www.teemagnet.com/

    Now what the system is for compensating their artists on said amalgamated sites - I've not a clue. Tee Magnet however is just a vessel as it were - so looking for info there wouldn't help, I'd imagine.

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  11. Chandra: By weird I assume you mean the anonymous post, right? Weird indeed.

    I'll have to look into teemagnet. And there's always cafepress.com too. Honestly I haven't had time to think about getting shirts made this week.

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  12. Time is a fickle bitch. Too bad you don't have a time machine of some sort. ;)

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  13. This is awesome!! And yes, I'd buy one. I'd prefer the enemies one, actually -- I think it would be more recognizable to people. Most people don't know much about Dr. Who, but if they're heard of it at all, they probably know about Daleks and Cybermen. But nobody outside the core fandom knows the episode titles.
    Dr. OTR

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  14. Is there a significance to the ones you used for the white areas?, since they stand out

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  15. Anonymouse: That's a good point about the enemies vs. titles. But I think the titles fill up the space better, and help define the shape more.

    Chandra: No significance to the "window" titles. Other than they were the ones I could wrangle into those square window shapes. I would have a specific shape that needed filled, and it would take a lot of searching through the title list to find the one that would fit that space perfectly. For the record I didn't squeeze or stretch any of the fonts (that's a no no to graphic designers!).

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  16. There is a lot of recent interest in postcards for real-life letter writing. Via CafePress or Zazzle, this would make a GREAT postcard, as well as a T-shirt, coffee mug, etc. I don't know how to set those accounts up, but this is a wonderful image, and I hope you'll make it available for purchase.

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  18. Send me the vector, I'll make the shirts and throw them on my Etsy site. I don't make very much on shirts so I can't afterward send you millions of dollars in a check, but all your people could get the shirts. I'm just a small time guy in sac, looking for good designs when I saw yours.

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  19. These would look great as a larger wall decal as well, which I also do. (shop.jerusharuth.com if you're interested in seeing my other stuff)

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