a picture is worth a thousand words

Posts Tagged ‘text’

Words of the Queen

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II passed away last September. She was not only a beloved person in Commonwealth countries but also a historical character with a huge and widely respected background. She took responsibilities very young, and I think she was a great example for his people.

I took more than 330 Queen speeches from this site https://www.royal.uk/speeches including her Christmas broadcasts. I only found speeches from 1970 and one of them was missing (broken link) so I had to recover it from Internet Archive (https://archive.org/).

With text cleaned, taken only Queen words, and removing some translation to French, I counted all relevant words. It drops a list of more than 4600 different words with repetition from 480 times to just one appearance.

The beginning of the list: Commonwealth (480),future (250),Prince (246),Christmas (244),celebrate (226),service (218),Philip (197),Kingdom (194),welcome (189),communities (188),thank (187),peace (167),opportunity (165),support (164),shared (163),Parliament (152),achieved (147),success (145),challenges (144),Mr (142),pleasure (132),reminded (128),delighted (124),occasion (124),anniversary (122),contribution (121),Wales (121),Britain (120),generations (120),present (120),Gentlemen (117),Royal (114),inspiration (112),Queen (109),spirit (107),faith (100),Australia (99),recent (99),events (97),Canada (96),culture (96),courage (92),friendship (92),international (92),proud (92),reflect (91),Minister (90),respect (90),London (89),memories (89),traditions (89),prosperity (88),throughout (87),relationship (86),Jubilee (84),confidence (83),de (83),partnership (83),responsibility (83),Assembly (82),message (81),society (81),encouragement (76)…

As base image I selected two very different portraits. First one the official image used to announce her death and another one from a very young Elizabeth, close to the moment she becomes Queen.

In between, a whole life dedicated to her people.


Keanu Reeves

Keanu is probably the most loved and nice actor out there. Despite his great success and extensive filmography, everyone that meets him talks about how kind human being he is.

So, I decided to pick a ‘very human’ portrait of Keanu, instead of any of his fictional characters. Original photo from Governo do Estado de São Paulo, taken in a meeting with the actor in 2019.

I took all more relevant words from his movie’s titles. A total of 144 words.

White background is a challenge when talking about text illustrations. I tried my best combining multiple text layers to keep everything in vector. It’s a complicate task and a huge native file but I think it worth the effort.

I guess Keanu deserves it.