Show HN: I Made this Y Combinator T-Shirt (Words from PG's Essays)

I don't want to put words into anyone else's mouth here, but if anyone ever made and wore a t-shirt containing a frequency count of the words in stuff I'd written, then I'd find it kinda creepy and weird.

A few years ago I made a similar word cloud of his essays using Wordle:<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/akCnD.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/akCnD.png</a><p>I've often thought it would make a good shirt or book cover.

If I could use one word to describe that design, it would be "tasteful."

Sort of off topic, but I wonder if you can copyright or otherwise do something legalish with specific word frequency distributions. It's not nearly enough information to, say, reconstruct a corpus, but it's often sufficient information to identify someone with precision (so I've heard, anyway).

Now HN only needs its own memes and its transformation to reddit 2 will be complete.

I always just wanted the ycombinator on a shirt, and spreadshirt looked easy enough to use so I gave it a shot. Here's what turned out: <a href="http://wright.spreadshirt.com/men-s-heavyweight-t-shirt-A7571859/customize/color/2" rel="nofollow">http://wright.spreadshirt.com/men-s-heavyweight-t-shirt-A757...</a><p>I'd highly recommend spreadshirt by the way. The site was incredibly easy to use to create the shirt and storefront, and if the shirt quality is anything like the American Apparel shirts I own, it should be very good quality shirts as well.

Do I get Birkenstocks and a fresh pair of socks if I join this cult?

I think it's awesome. Very cool.

I see most of "Make something people want" but none of "Relentlessly Resourceful". If I were making a YC T-shirt <i>that's</i> what I would put on it.

I've always wondered how this is actually done, algorithm-wise. Can someone more knowledgeable give me a link, or at least a google search term?

wow that is super cool. what did you use to make that?

Why not just make an actual essay into a t-shirt? The instapaper logo is a merlin mann essay, for example.<p>Sorry to be blunt, but word clouds are just ε over meaningless.

Where's "it turns out"?

No offense, and call me a cynic, but I don't think this would get you into YC.

I think its a great design coming from a designer myself, but I'm no lawyer and I don't think you can be making money off someones logo or brand. I dont think you need to be a lawyer to know that either.<p>Plain and simple, would you want to create a startup and someone make tshirts and make money off your brand or logo?