when to wordle

Written by Rip Robinson

Hey, here's a really cool web app. --> Wordle. It's "a toy for generating word clouds". A magical equation for calligraphy is what it is: you input your passage of text, Wordle gives it form.

The artistic and philosophical part of me has mixed feelings: Is a shortcut to an arty result any less art? I am of the mind that the person who created the shortcut is a bit of an artist. There is beauty in algorithms as there is in snowflakes.

I didn't create these images by hand and scan them in. I didn't spend hours in PhotoShop creating them on the computer. Maybe there is little art in what I did, but I like the result and such images have their use in my line of work.

The entrepreneurial part of me wonders why I am putting you onto one of my little discoveries: a discovery that helps my workflow, and may help to bolster the fragile impression that I am some kind of design creative or digital guru. Yeah.

This is the fruits of a mathematical genius over at IBM research and he is letting us use it for free. We get to choose the text that composes the cloud. And we can set several parameters such as background color, color scheme for the words, orientation of the words. I like the random element, seeing what the program comes up with for the final image. Save it as a PDF, download it, and you are done.

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