Now This is Super Rad!

Adam Mazerall

Women's Post Associate Publisher/Editor-in-Chief and sardonic twit.

So I'm a bit of a design junkie. I say "a bit" because I can be very close-minded as to what I would deem good and innovative design, and I always seem to be inspired by the same type of composition and stylization. I should also mention that I'm a bit of a typography nerd. Typography is the clothing that dresses words and gives them emotive powers. That being said, I just had to share this amazing site I came across a few minutes ago as I was looking over the 13th Annual Webby Awards winners and nominees.

During my studies at Humber College for Advertising and Graphic Design, I was often given "in-class" exercises such as creating wine labels or logos or posters, and the like. These varied in intensity from class to class, and always seemed to me to be a "time-filler" or "busy work." Sometimes fun, sometimes boring, but always worth the 2 percent toward my final grade (well, at times.) Typography was a course particularly heavy in said exercises. I remember one such being a "word cloud" which is basically a random assortment of text in a composition, with varying typographic hierarchy - such as differentiation in weight, colour, size, texture, etc. Well this word cloud (which I of course filled with lyrics from one of my favourite Mariah Carey songs) took about two hours of finessing on the PowerMac in class.

Fastforward to twenty minutes ago, when I stumble across Wordle. This awesome site basically does in four seconds what took me two hours of work in Illustrator. Simply cut and paste text, or provide a link to a site with a feed, and customize the layout, colour, and typography of your composition and voila! You have your own word cloud that can be used for whatever purpose you deem fit. Had I known about this seven months ago I could have saved myself a lot of time and frustration and numerous glaring looks at the back of my prof's head. But hey, such is life, nescafe?

Try it out when you're bored or procrastinating. Guaranteed you'll at least have a little "Huh" moment going on. Ciao for now.

PS The words are lyrics from Thanx 4 Nothin' by - who else? - Mariah Carey. Great song, I recommend downloading it.