In Praise of Webicon

For this Thursday’s “Other Sites I Like” post, I’ll add one more site that is purely for fun to go with Graphjam and GIFSoup that I’ve featured in previous weeks.

Webicon.me is a feature of Paste Magazine and allows users to take ordinary photos and modify them into one of five designs, with four core features:

1. Obamicon which transforms photos into images with blue, grey and red colors reminiscent of the Obama campaign posters
2. Luvicon which puts photos into a pink posterized format complete with a heart on which you can write a message
3. Iranicon which similarly transforms photos but puts them into a green format similar to Iranian election posters
4. Conanicon which modifies the photo to add a big swath of red hair to look like Conan O’Brien

Like similar sites, Webicon stores users’ creations and shares them in a gallery for rating and comment.  In addition, once you’ve created an image, you can order a mug, t-shirt, stamp and other items with that image emblazoned.

The pictures are all created with similar functionality.  Click on the design you’d like from the Webicon main page.  You then either snap your own photo with a webcam or upload any jpeg, gif, or png photo up to 4MB in size.  Once the photo is uploaded, you can choose to use the image as-is or tell the software where your main image is located by clicking around that image.  It’s a bit tedious, although the image of Marcia Brady at right took only three minutes to cut out.  Once you’ve saved your image, you can then change the picture text, rotate or zoom in, and change the color.  Click “save & submit” and you are all done.

(For the record, I don’t have a Marcia Brady thing.  Since I used Marcia for the animated GIF, I might as well use her here as well.)

To show the ease of this site – I create a few others below.

My fellow Washington Capitals fans should enjoy the one of the left and my kids the one on the right.  Enjoy.