Recently I have seen a question coming up with regards to creating artwork from arranging words of different sizes into a specific shape. Today I wanted to tell you about a simple way to create such artwork, though admittedly you don’t have as many options as you may like.
The word cloud you see above was created in only a couple of minutes. I used a Web site by the name of Wordle to create it. In order to use the tool, you must have Java installed on your browser. Then you can either paste in text or use a link to build the cloud. There are a number of options for manipulating the cloud, but you can’t easily choose a specific shape. Once the cloud has been created, there is no way to save it to any format. The only thing you can do is a screen capture. That’s exactly how I created the graphic above.
While it wouldn’t be easy, you could use the screen capture as a template to re-create the artwork as vector by typing out and sizing each of the words as needed. Wordle is not the only tool for this type of thing. A recent article at the Online Journalism Blog discussed if you should use a Word cloud or bar chart?
