The word cloud

About 750 years ago, I found myself trying to write an ad campaign for a brand of sun-tan products called Hawaiian Tropic.

Rather than write a traditional headline and couple of lines of copy, as was expected, I tried to get my art director and, more importantly, my boss, to agree that what we’d have on these 2 pages of premium magazine real-estate was simply a fantastic, typographic melee of words.

The words would all be associated with the atmosphere we wanted to evoke, and therefore with the true, underlying message of the brand, but would not follow each other sequentially to deliver a thought at the end of a sentence.

No chance. No-one was having any of it.

Over the last few years, however, blogging has made the Word Cloud a familiar part of the digital landscape. In the right column of so many blogs you’ll find a ‘cloud’ of typographically larger and smaller words, arranged by size based on the apparent importance of that word to the posts appearing in that blog.

On Facebook and other social networking sites, you’ll find free-association lists provided by their authors, of words which collectively represent his or her life.

It’s a fascinating and revealing format, which leaves the reader to explore or extrapolate from the information offered.

If you’ve not tried to create a word cloud around yourself, or your business or your brand (even if you never use it for anything), it’d definitely be an hour well spent.

Comments

[su sareen]

Bloody art directors eh : )
But now there's even a free online widget where you can generate word clouds - you choose your own words, font, colours and layout - have a go here:
http://wordle.net/