Frankly Franklin - The design and technology blog of Tim Ngwena

As mentions in her review of 2008 “it had seemed as if the year was holding its breath, aware that something was coming, but not sure what”. Well, we eventually found out, it wasn’t a great year and its sure to leave a few scars on 2009, at least your new years resolution  is well timed to  hopefully change 2009.

The word cloud above that Ive posted on my DeviantArt profile, hopefully puts the most impacting and influential people, words, phrases and headlines of 2008 all onto an image, courtesy of a wonderful online app called Wordle. Wordle has the ability of taking text and creating a tag cloud based on the most frequently used words/tags and then laying it out in a graphical form as shown above. This feature or graphical representation is a common appearance on blogs and social bookmarking sites.

Visit Wordle and have a play.

If your wondering how I created mine, here is a quick tutorial but before that here’s something i found on youtube.

1. I got some content to use for Wordle. I wanted more control so i used Wordle Advanced which lets you specify the weighting of words and a colour in the hex format. In my case i searched sites like wikipedia, Sky News, The Guardian etc and compiled a list of words (194 to be exact )
2. Having got some content you can either run it through Wordle straight away or if your using Wordle advanced, you’ll need to asign a weighting to the words you’ve chosen. I have pasted the first few terms from my Wordle submission and their weighting below
   • BarackObama :380
   • CreditCrunch :410
   • GeorgeBush :90
   • World :200
3. Once you’ve run it , basically keep randomising and play around with the settings on the top left till your happy
4. I printed my Wordle to a pdf format and opened it in Adobe Illustrator which gave me a vector format of the tag cloud
5. Dropped that into photoshop, tweaked it ever so slightly and the end result is shown above!
6. I then submitted it to DeviantArt and that’s where it resides.

Have a go and post some links of what you’ve done in the comments section or if you think I’ve missed a crucial event of 2008 post it below and we’ll see what Wordle can do with this post.