Get Your Words in a Cloud

Last week, I shared photos from my friend Becky’s This Old House renovation. As you can imagine, it was a bit challenging to shop for a housewarming gift for a home renovated on national television, and accessorized by a team of seasoned designers and decorators.

Sweet and sentimental seemed the way to go.  I created this word cloud/collage for Becky and Joe, by plugging the RSS feed from Becky’s This Old House blog directly into the website Wordle.net, and framed it like this:

I didn’t want to make a fuss during the wrap party, so I placed it in Becky’s laundry room and showed her when the crowds had cleared a bit. She seemed to love it, but then added, “And it matches this room just perfectly.” I was a little mortified – I had grander visions than the laundry room!

As indecisive as I always, I actually left Becky with a dozen versions of the Wordles I had printed at Staples, in a variety of colors and fonts.  I couldn’t throw them away, but figured she would. She’s since told me she actually rotates them once in awhile. In the OFFICE!!

Now, About Wordle:

If you haven’t wordled anything yet, try it now! Just go to www.wordle.net and enter text.  You don’t need to sign up or give your e-mail address, credit card or first-born.

From the Wordle website:  Wordle will create “word clouds” from text you provide.  The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.  The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

By some freak accident of copyright/intellectual property law I used to understand (waaaay back when I studied for the Bar), the genius who invented this was working at IBM at the time of wrote the code, and thus neither the inventor nor IBM can profit it off of it. So it is free. Totally. Completely. Free.

You can insert the entire text of your college thesis, your child’s report card, sweet words from your child to dad or grandpa for Father’s Day, or superlatives about your child’s teacher for a personal end of the year gift.

My son’s teachers asked me to help design a cover for the kids’ end of the year autograph books. For lack of any major inspiration, I decided to wordle it.

Autograph Book Cover Design

Wordle Tutorial

The website is easy to use and includes a great FAQ, but to save you a few minutes, I’ll walk you through wordle using the autograph book cover example.

1. Visit www.wordle.net and click on CREATE.

2. Type in desired text under “Paste in a bunch of text.” I typed in the name of each child and teacher in the class, followed by:

• Autographs
• Autographs
• Autographs
• TK~2012 
• TK~2012
• TK~2012

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