Wordle like Random Word Clouds

Friday, 08 June 2012 | Creativity Challenges

Word Clouds are an interesting concept made popular by the website Wordle. There are now quite a few others out there and they can be quite fun to play with. I encourage you to have a go. Our minds are visual in nature and yet a lot of the information we have to work with is textual in nature. Anything we can do to change that is an advantage. This weeks challenge is a slightly different type of word cloud.

This weeks challenge is to create your own word cloud for a particular topic (see below for a few examples) based on a set of random words from our Idea Generator.

You'll notice that in our idea generator you can move, resize and rotate (rotate not available in earlier versions of IE unfortunately) the random words. Rather than using a tool such as Wordle to analyse a piece of text and place and size the words for you, we are going to take creative control of our piece and really make a statement.

This is an interesting challenge as you will have no control over the words you get but you do have control over where you place them, in what direction and size. Maybe placing some words next to certain others enhances their meaning or alters it? Does rotating a word alter it's apparent meaning? Is the overall shape of your word cloud part of the statement? Lining up certain letters to give an interesting effect? etc. If you think about it, you can find all manner of creative possibility here.

Also, don't keep refreshing the words till you get words you like. That's cheating. You must use the original words you get. You may keep adding as many words as you like however.

When you're done, take a screenshot as well. If you post it up on the web make sure you leave us a comment below with a link to it. (Click here to find out how to take a screenshot on your OS)

Here are a few topic suggestions but you may come up with your own: