Juan Osborne’s Letter Portraits

Today’s installment of incredible celebrity portraits comes courtesy of Spanish architect/designer/programmer Juan Osborne, who created his own software to turn a group of words related to some of the 20th century’s most iconic people into images of them. His images of Kurt Cobain and The Beatles, for example, were created using some of their lyrics (the latter used the word “love” 701 times—683 times more than the former did).

We’ve included some of our favourite of Juan’s portraits here, including an image of TED co-founder Richard Saul created with the most commonly used words in TED Talks, a portrait of Barack Obama using words from over 100 of his speeches, and a statue of Oscar created with the names of every nominee from the 2011 awards.

Particularly impressive is the way in which Juan departed from his use of text to create a portrait of Alfred Hitchcock using of over 1000 stills from his films. This is one artist whose work deserves the extra bandwidth it takes to load his images full-size and better admire the detail in them. Hell, we’re tempted to order wall-size versions of some of these like this advertising company in Istanbul did.