Tuesday 6 January 2009

Making Art out of Words - the easy way




Here is a simple, free app that I know my students are going to love experimenting with, given its immediacy and knock-out end result.

www.wordle.net is a piece of sheer brilliance. Add text, or link to a website/blog, and Wordle transforms this into an instant Java based text mashup. There are plenty of options to play around with, including a range of cool fonts, text layouts and colour combinations. 

Showing is often better than telling, so here are some results: my Delicious social bookmarking entries (a nice word cloud above), the opening to the Aeneid, and some of my poems. I've also begun to play around with simple aphorisms, and that's going to be an ongoing experiment. If  you click on any of the images they'll take you to my space on Flickr. Click on the 'All Sizes' option above each image and you'll be able to see a larger version.

The more times you repeat a word the more prominent it becomes. Cut and pasting can produce some interesting results. There's a lot that can be done with this nifty piece of software. Enjoy.


4 comments:

Dan Felstead said...

Sacha,

WOW! This sounds neat! I am going to download it now and play with it. Thanks for the heads up and i hope you had a wonderful holiday.

Dan

TesoriTrovati said...

Woohoo!
Sacha I love this app!
My love of fonts and words and poetry and prose will eat this up. I see so many possibilities. Thank you for sharing this. Your students must think you are the coolest teacher around.
Wishing you a wonderful New Year.
Enjoy the day!
Erin

_we_the_pieces_ said...

WOAh!!! that is awesome! I am >so< going to be using that in the future. Thanks for sharing that!

Sacha van Straten said...

You won't get much done. I think I'm almost over my obsession with making multiple versions of the same poem or text extract.

I've put a few more up on Flickr:

http://snipurl.com/9kv4t

Enjoy!
Sacha