Ahhhh, ever present word clouds. Sometimes these can be used to increase search engine hits on webpages and sometimes they can been used for art. Wordle.net uses them for art.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

The above graphic was created using their web-based Java applet. Wordle uses a very simple interface and can take seconds to come up with a beautifully designed word cloud image. The above image was created using words taken from the statica.com homepage. I hit the randomize buttons a few times to produce a result I was happy with.

The project has not been updated for years, so it lacks the diversity it ‘could’ have if it was developed further. There are reasons for their lack of development and if you want the details… check out their blog at blog.wordle.net.

For an alternate Wordle system, check out WordCram. It is another system currently in development.