Two days back, I wanted to create a wallpaper using inspirational words and quotes arranged like a collage or cloud. Making eye-candy word collage in any photo editor available is very tough task. Earlier I’ve wrote a article on making photo collages, which gave me an idea to search for how I can make a word collage online in Google. And I found this beautiful free utility named – Wordle. “Beautiful Word Clouds” – That’s what Wordle does perfectly and awesomely. Let’s check out how you can use Wordle and some other fun stuff using it.

If you’re in too hurry to start using Wordle, you can follow below steps,
Open Wordle.net. In navigation click on “Create” and you’ll get three options to start creating word clouds.

1. Paste a bunch of words in a box provided.
2. Enter any blog URL or RSS feed URL. This option only works with webpages that have RSS feed.
3. Give del.icio.us user name. Word cloud will be created from the user tags.

This was for dummies who wanted to start in hush. If you want to know more powerful wordle tips, keep reading.

There are lots of options after you create a basic Wordle,

• You can make words all-caps or all-lower case. You can filter common words like “and”, “or” etc with options provided. This filter is provided for more than 30 languages.
• There are 30 fonts provided to make the collage that suits your attitude!
• Most important is Layout option. Using this option you can decide the orientation of words. For e.g.
  • Any Which Way will arrange words in random orientation.
  • Horizontal will place all words in horizontal fashion.
  • Mostly Horizontal will render result with most words in horizontal position.
  • etc.
• It counts the word occurrence and accordingly sizes the word.
• Various color palette options are provided.

One biggest turn-off about Wordle is, you can not save the word cloud as an image! Yeah that’s true. Even I got a shocker because what’s the meaning of creating beautiful word collages if you can not save them. But I’ll show you how can you do that.

• After making a word cloud from create tab, click on “Open in Window”
• This will open the wordle in new window which can be maximized.
• After maximizing to it full, you can take screenshot of it.
• Save that screenshot in jpg format in Microsoft Paint. You’re done.

One more advanced trick is, if you want phrases to form a collage you should use ‘~’ i.e. tilda character. Suppose you want create word cloud from phrases like “Words are beautiful”, “I love typography”, “Design Inspiration” etc. Then you should paste the phrases like “Words~are~beautiful”, “I~love~typography”, “Design~Inspiration” and so on.

Let’s check out some wordles created from leading technology blogs.

1) Techcrunch.com

Twitter seems to be favorite with Techcrunch. (Most used word on the site is shown the biggest)

2) Mashable.com

3) ReadWriteWeb.com

ReadWriteWeb’s favorites are Google, Android, Mobile and Pandora

4) SlashGear.com

SlashGear talks about Dell the most.

5) SmashingMagazine.com

Design is what SmashingMagazine’s forte.

To conclude, why I like Wordle? Because,

• It’s Free.
• No watermarks.
• It’s online. No downloads needed.
• And finally, it’s really awesome.

Try Wordle, create some beautiful word collages and share with others in comments.

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