Obsessive about obfuscation

My perhaps strangest confession to date: I’m annoyed about all the common ways people obfuscate text. I think I developed this frustration during the GUIdebook times. In my gallery of splash screens, I would often be faced with this situation: I didn’t want to propagate the registration info, and could think of a few ways to obfuscate it: The first one felt okay, but it looked like the information just wasn’t there to begin with. Black bars and blurring didn’t look realistic, felt ugly, and drew too much attention to something ultimately not as important. Eventually I arrived at the last solution – the Diffuse filter in Photoshop – which I felt kept the text’s “texture” (or, color in the typographical sense). You can see it everywhere in GUIdebook’s splash collection. What somehow didn’t occur to me at that time was an even better solution: to modify the existing text instead of covering it. Make up a realistic name or serial number, typeset it exactly the same way, and plop it in the…