Word Clouds and Word Art

About a year ago, I posted some information about two interesting sites - Wordle and Tagxedo.  You can find that post HERE.   I find these images fascinating and text based art is very trendy so I thought it would be nice to link the post for you to read and share a few examples of images I made on the Tagxedo site. 

You can save the art you create on the Tagxedo site to use for your projects.  These first few heart shaped images are based on my blog. 

You simply enter the URL of a site and the site calculates the frequency of word use and sizes the words in the image to reflect how often they are used (the larger words are the ones that appear more often).  You can edit the list to remove words or abbreviations that you don't want to appear in the image.

There are many color themes and fonts and you can reset the image over and over again.

There are quite a few built in shapes that you can use - isn't this shoe fun!  You can also upload a shape of your own.

It is fascinating to see all of the variations - I could spend hours on the site.

This star shape would be fun filled with the words of a vacation journal.

The site keeps a history going back 50 or so versions of your designs so you can try lots of things and then choose your favorite.

This apple was made with the words from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

You can find the Tagxedo site HERE.  I hope you have some fun trying things out!

I am driving south today and I won't be online much for the next few days.  I have a backlog of email to get through so please be patient if you have sent me a message and haven't had a reply yet.  Things have been a little crazy these past few weeks.  The weather is supposed to get very hot over the next few days - take care and be sure to stay well hydrated!

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Another Great Site for Word Clouds

I recently posted a reminder about the Wordle site for making word clouds that you can use for various cards and projects.  I started looking around for other sites and I found one that you should definitely visit and use to try making some word art. 

This site is called "Tagxedo" and it has lots of interesting options.  For the image at the top of this post I used the description of the Cricut Imagine machine from the Cricut.com website as the text.  (Just click on any image to make it larger).

You can change the font and the orientation of the words and make another cloud.  Just keep spinning the various options until you find one you really like.

There are many color themes to choose from and you can even do your own thing and choose all custom colors for your cloud.

Another nice feature is the ability to fit the words to a shape.  Here is a simple heart (in another interesting font and color palette).

The shapes give an interesting twist and there are lots of stock shapes to try.  This elephant is filled with words relating to Mother's Day that were used for the site example.

You can even upload your own shapes to be totally creative.  I tried it with a Cricut shape from the Lovely Floral cartridge using my blog url as the text source.  The possibilities are truly endless.

The Tagxedo site is HERE.  There are also three blogs connected to the site.  I am fascinated by the portraits that appear in the gallery on the main site and in the Celebrity Tagxedo blog.  Here are the links to the blogs.

All Things Tagxedo

Daily Tagxedo

Celebrity Tagxedo

I started out intending to make a word cloud for Father's Day.  I still haven't done that - I was having too much fun just trying some of the many options.

I hope you are having a great weekend - it rained here and since it was Graduation Day at the high school the ceremony had to be held inside.  It also turned very cold - from nearly 100 degrees a few days ago to the mid 50s today - will the weather ever be "normal" this year?

link to Discussion Day #5 - Life is too Short...

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Something you might enjoy...

 

I found the Wordle site a couple of years ago and wrote about it HERE  This is a great resource for designing word clouds that can be used for all sorts of projects.  I think they would be fun for t-shirts for a graduating class with all of the names listed.

Every so often, I try making a wordle using my blog feed as the source of the words.  The one at the top of this post is the most recent - I think I have been a little preoccupied with flowers lately!  (The size of the word is determined by how frequently it appears in the text used to create the cloud).

Click HERE for the direct link to the site.  Fair warning - you can spend a lot of time trying all of the variations.  I think you will have fun with it - try putting in the text of a famous speech or your child's history paper - anything goes!

The weather was beautiful Saturday but I did not get out to enjoy it.  I am hoping that another day of rest and some medicine will knock this cold out so I can get back to normal.  Thanks for all of the get well wishes!

I'll try to catch up with a new challenge and discussion topic next week.

link to Discussion Day #4  -  How do you decide?
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A bit of Word Fun!

I discovered the Wordle site yesterday (here is a LINK)

This is the description from the site:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that 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.

So, I tried it and it is so much fun - I can't stop!

You can create your own images and either keep them private or share in the Wordle Gallery. There are thousands created and shared each week and it is fun to browse through them. A word of warning, there is no "filter" for adult content when you browse the gallery. So far I have not seen anything offensive, but there could be some that you would not want your children to see.

I have actually spent most of my time on the site creating some of my own clouds - you can enter text (a speech or news article) or "the URL of any blog, blog feed, or any other web page that has an Atom or RSS feed. "

There are multiple fonts, colors and layouts. The picture at the top of this post is one wordle version of my blog and the picture just below is also my blog "wordlelized!"



Below are three versions of the Cricut Design Studio home page - there are endless variations!







You could use these to create unusual journal blocks for your scrapbook pages or to create personalized cards for any occasion. You could enter all of the characteristics you admire about a person and do a page with the wordle and their photo.

You can also use this to create ideas for ways to combine words in a design studio file. Below is the phrase "Now is the time and this is the place" - I typed "time" and "place" three times each so they would be larger.



Here is a screen shot of this "translated" into Design Studio with the Opposites Attract font



and after tweaking the design a bit to keep it all welded in one piece



All of the designs above were created on http://wordle.net

You can save ("print") these designs as PDFs and SVG (scaleable vector graphics) files - there are directions on the Wordle site in the FAQs.

I do have more Design Studio designs to post but wanted to share this site with you - have fun with it!