Thursday, February 14, 2008

Valentine's Day card.... with cryptography!

Here's a fun nerdy valentine's gag using "visual cryptography."

The idea is you have two sheets, which separately look like random static noise, but when you put them together, a message pops out!

You can try this online (if you're bored and want to nerd out along with me). You take your valentine's day message and use the program to create the two staticy/snowy lookin' squares. You print one of the squares on a normal piece of paper, and the other on an overhead transparency. Yes, I drove to Staples and spent $20, JUST for this reason! :-S



Then you print some regular message on a regular sheet of paper and sandwich it in between to "hide" your secret love message. You can see the regular message says "happy valentine's day-pull to reveal secret message" (and I taped a little tab to the side to make it easier to pull out).



As you start to pull out the middle sheet, you can see the two layers combining... showing the secret message.


And the secret message is revealed: "I Love You."


Well... it's hardly a secret: I love you, Anna. Happy Valentine's Day!

4 comments:

Julie said...

lol aww!

That's too cute Aleks! Very nerdy but that's what makes it so darn cute lol

nature roots said...

great work Aleks@!
and convey congrats to jen, there is an article about her blog in nnsl
check out the link
http://www.nnsl.com/members/newspapers/stories/feb11_08jen.html

Rob, Tina and the boys said...

Ahhh, very cute. :)

Aleks said...

@NR,

Hey thanks. I got the old pay-wall with that particular link, but found a variation that seems to work:

http://nnsl.com/northern-news-services/stories/papers/feb11_08jen.html