Word clouds, or tag clouds as they are also know as, are a more recent development of the web world. Developed by sites like Flickr and Delicious to help their users tag and organize content. What intrigues about word clouds is the merging of design and data into one form. It is a way to convey information about that may be large or unwieldy in a quick visually stimulating way. A world could can be as simple as a group of words ordered by importance in the given piece that it is representing, defining such by size and or color, but more and more frequently a certain amount of aesthetics emerges. It is a way to design information, to arrange data so that people will not only be able to quickly look at it and get the data that they need but become drawn into it.
Screen capture : www.wordle.net
This is an example of a word could that I created from this blog. It was created automatically from an online service Wordle, that I found while researching for my last blog about Nathan Shedroff. First the user must enter ether a block of text or a url for the service to scan, from there a general word cloud is created from the data provided. The user is then given a set of parameters that they manipulate to their own liking, these include color, orientation and font.
Like Wordle the Facebook application Status could, that pulls from your Facebook status updates. It is less advanced than the Wordle service but shows how word clouds are being more generally accepted as a form of communicating information.
This is an example of a Status Cloud that I did of my status updates over the last year, it show the words that I used most prominently while talking about myself and what was happening in my life.
The world cloud is huge, it demonstrates not only the evolution of Web 2.0 but the evolution of how society seeks information. We have become bored by the old broadside format of print journalism and the filing systems of old. This is also an exmple of the importance of design in the future of everything. As we are bombarded with more and more information that we have ever been before we begin to create new filters for this data. An easy example is aesthetics, we are now judging information on how aesthetically pleasing it is to us. Word clouds used desing principals like placement, color, texture, size, and depth to create chunks of information for easy and quick ingesting.
Word Clouds do have their downfalls, they lack the ability to communicate complete thoughts or even phrases, but they do provide us with a glimpse at the future of design. We as designers must take on every field that we are faces with not just the traditional realms that we have been placed in. We must work outside our respective boxes to help not only change the look of the world but how we a humans perceive and interact with it. Pulling together what Objectified and Nathan Shedroff talked about, we as the future designers have to take the world by its horns and apply our skills where they are needed, even if it is not our field of expertise. Design is about creating, so lets create a better future.
PS- A word could created from the text of this blog post :) I couldn't help myself, and if you are interested in more info on the word could you can find it here, including the algorithm for creating your own.
Screen capture : www.wordle.net
No comments:
Post a Comment