This presentation is a short explanation of the visual data toool, word clouds. The point of this presentation is to give you an idea of what a word cloud is, how it is used, and how you can create one.

A word cloud is like any chart, graph, or diagram -- it is a visual representation of some data set.

The data set used to create a word cloud is a list of keywords or tags.

By making the more important keywords either a larger font size or distinctive color, the word cloud ranks the importance of a set of keywords related to a topic. For example, a word cloud on St. Rose School would have the words students, school, Chelsea, and Catholic in a large font or distinctive color because those are keywords associated with the school.

Next there will be examples to give you some ideas of how you can create your own word clouds.

Some word clouds are indeed shapeless cloud-like forms.

Other word clouds have clever shapes that relate to the topic.

Some word clouds strictly rely on font size to communicate the importance of the keywords. This example uses one font style with only the colors black and white.

Other word clouds use different shades of one color to categorize and rank the importance of the keywords in addition to font size. A variety of fonts in shades of purple are used in this example.

While other word clouds use colors on the opposite sides of the color wheel to create contrast and make more important keywords stands out against less important keywords. This example uses shades of the complimentary colors blue and orange.