Covid-19 is a lethal pandemic, and our thoughts go out to those who have lost loved-ones or livelihoods to the disease.
That said, this is a special time of year, so we felt appropriate to give coronavirus a halloweenesque (halloweenable, halloweenish?) treatment. We’re going to make a Halloween poster featuring the virus, and we’re going to do it with magick. Of course.
Materials and Methods
Fonts: the run-of-the-mill fonts just don’t quite do it for halloween. So we turned to fonts4free and their line-up of sinister fonts. Ghastly Panic and Gypsy Curse, and Fiendish looked about right, with an honourable mention to October Crow. The extrafont package is pretty good at handling the installation of new fonts, but for these three I just downloaded the .ttf files and put them in my fonts directory.
Background: There are lots corona posters out there. We chose one from the Health Service Executive here in Ireland. We downloaded it and put it in a local directory.
The Code
First we put in place the libraries we’ll need:
tidyverse is an ever present, magick does the heavy lifting, showtext to access the new fonts, emojifont to get some Halloween icons, and here because it is so useful.
Next we’ll load up those fonts.
Now we can start to build our poster. We use magick to read in the hse image file. It initially has a white border that is then cropped out. On top on this we place a yellow block and a white block to cover existing Coronavirus and Covid-19 text (we had discerned the exact shade of yellow beforehand, thank you colorfindr), and a white block to cover other text further down the poster. Then we replace these with the same text in our Halloween fonts.
corona <- image_read("images/covid.jpg") %>%
image_crop("625x900+185+50") %>%
image_draw()
# get rid of existing text by putting colour blocks over them
rect(xleft = 0, ybottom = 150, xright = 400, ytop = 0, border = NA, col = "#FFEE00")
rect(xleft = 80, ybottom = 850, xright = 545, ytop = 680, border = NA, col = "#FFFFFF")
# add new text in appropriate fonts
text(x = 200, y = 100, family = "Gypsy Curse", cex = 8,
label = "Coronavirus")
text(x = 130, y = 200, family = "Ghastly Panic", cex = 6,
label = "Covid-19")
text(x = 312, y = 825, adj = c(0.5, 0), family = "Fiendish", cex = 2,
label = "Remember\n\nTo keep 2m apart\n\nin the seating area")
Next up we use emojifont to make some extra graphics featuring halloween stuff. In this case spiders, bats, and skulls, but emojifont::search_emoji(str = "") shows that are far more available. The original graphics had an annoying border top and left, image_crop() was used to erase these.
spider <- image_graph(width = 300, height = 400, res = 50)
ggplot() +
geom_emoji("spider", color='black') +
theme_void() +
theme(panel.background = element_rect(fill = "#FFEE00"))
spider <- image_crop(spider, "299x399+1+1") %>%
image_scale(50)
bat <- image_graph(width = 300, height = 400, res = 50)
ggplot() +
geom_emoji("bat", color='black') +
theme_void() +
theme(panel.background = element_rect(fill = "#FFEE00"))
bat <- image_crop(bat, "299x399+1+1") %>%
image_scale(50)
scream <- image_graph(width = 300, height = 400, res = 50)
ggplot() +
geom_emoji("scream", color='black') +
theme_void() +
theme(panel.background = element_rect(fill = "#FFEE00"))
scream <- image_crop(scream, "319x349+1+1") %>%
image_scale(80) %>%
image_rotate(270)
skull <- image_graph(width = 300, height = 400, res = 50)
ggplot() +
geom_emoji("skull", color='black') +
theme_void() +
theme(panel.background = element_rect(fill = "#FFFFFF"))
skull <- image_crop(skull, "299x329+1+1") %>%
image_scale(60)
head_bandage <- image_graph(width = 300, height = 400, res = 50)
ggplot() +
geom_emoji("face_with_head_bandage", color='black') +
theme_void() +
theme(panel.background = element_rect(fill = "#FFFFFF"))
head_bandage <- image_crop(head_bandage, "299x309+1+1") %>%
image_scale(60)
And finally to the complete poster, adding in our emojifont graphics. The exact position took a bit of trial and error.
corona %>% image_composite(spider) %>%
image_composite(bat, offset = "+200") %>%
image_composite(skull, offset = "+148+272") %>%
image_composite(head_bandage, offset = "+420+275") %>%
image_composite(scream, offset = "+535+550") %>%
image_resize("2000x1500")
Hope you like it.
Happy Halloween everyone, and stay safe.