Ransom Note Generator
Ransom note generator: type a line and every letter comes out cut from a different page, in its own typeface, scrap color and tilt. One seed reshuffles the lot.
What is the ransom note effect?
In typography, the ransom note effect means a line set in lots of clashing typefaces at once. It's named after the stereotypical ransom or poison pen letter, pasted together from letters cut out of newspapers and magazines so nobody could trace the handwriting.
Early Macintosh system software came with a bitmap font called San Francisco that imitated the look, and Microsoft commissioned a Ransom typeface in 1992.
How to make a ransom note
The tool opens on a blank canvas. Type your message in Text, up to 80 characters, and it wraps onto more lines if it gets too wide.
Colours holds the scraps of paper the letters get cut from, up to eight colors, and you can start from Newsprint, Black and white, Magazine or Candy. Each letter grabs a scrap at random, and its ink goes light on a dark scrap and dark on a light one.
Size is the letter height. Mess is how far letters tilt and jump off the line, and Position X and Y place the note. Seed recuts the whole thing with different faces, colors and tilts. Switch Style to Stickers and you get the white-edged letters of Sticker Text Generator.
Settings for a punk flyer, a tidy title and a note in brand colors
Punk flyer: the Black and white preset with Mess at 0.8. Two colors look like photocopied scraps, and at 0.8 the letters tilt up to about 9 degrees and jump by as much as an eighth of their height.
Tidy title: the Tidy preset puts Mess at 0, so the letters sit level on one line while the faces and scraps keep changing. It's a good fit for a heading people need to read at a glance.
Brand colors: type your own into Colours, and include at least one light color. Each scrap picks its ink by brightness, so an all-dark palette gives you a note made entirely of light letters.
Why did some of my letters change case?
It's part of the look. About three letters in ten flip between capital and small, as if they'd come from different headlines, and each letter's size varies between 0.8 and 1.2 times Size. You can't turn the swap off, but every Seed deals a different set, so step through Seeds until a word you care about keeps its case.
Letters are laid out left to right, which means a right-to-left script like Arabic or Hebrew comes out backwards.
How are the cut-out letters chosen?
Each letter comes from one of five faces: Archivo in heavy and light weights, Georgia in bold and italic, and Courier New in bold. Every scrap casts a soft shadow, like it's been pasted down.
None of the faces need downloading, so a letter never changes shape after it's drawn, and the same Seed gives you the same note in every export.
Saving a ransom note
PNG keeps the hard letter edges sharp against the flat scraps. The soft shadows underneath are the only part JPG copes with. The note is drawn on black, so if you want a desk or a cork board behind it, load that photo first.