Empowering users to make beautiful/creative text pictures with "text filters"?

Question

Complicated question but will try to explain as I really need help here :). As part of university work in design/film, I'm working on a UI design project that is going to be a tool for other students to use. It'll basically work as follows, all done DIGITALLY:

Students write a dialogue as part of a screenplay between 2-3 characters. You can think of the output of this as 10-12 quotes basically (~1-2 sentences each)

Then for each quote, they are going to convert it into an interesting visual "picture" - e.g., pick a font, pick a font color, pick a background color, pick how they lay out the words, pick whether to include other icons/symbols to bring it to life

After doing Step 2 for all 10-12 quotes, you basically have a cool flip book of quotes that tell the story in a colorful way

Step 2 is where I need help. I want to make a SIMPLE tool that helps people with this. Almost think of it as "photo filters" but "text filters" maybe? I don't need help with coding but the part I need help with is thinking through the design space for such text pictures -- what should the options be (beyond just font, text color, background color) to make sleek looking set of pictures all in one tool. E.g., add simple stylistically harmonious icons, allow people to move the words into specific spots, etc. This link inspires me quite a bit, but these are of course probably TOO diverse and one simple/intuitive tool is unlikely going to be able to make all of them:

https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2012/03/20-examples-of-beautiful-and-inspiring-fonts/

Thanks for any help / thoughts with this!

Answer 1

Maybe you should concretize the option's choice a bit, this will help you not to spread too much in a multitude of variants.

I think the beginning you raise in your options is almost infinite: choose a font. There are millions of fonts. Instead I would propose something more generic like choosing a global style so this style can come with some default fonts, colors and specific options.

Starting from a parent option such as choosing a style, it allows the rest of the variants to be re-divided into their own groups and adapted to that style with a fixed and determined number of variables: ~5 or 6 possible fonts, ~5 or 6 possible colors, frames, backgrounds, outline text, etc.