How to Create Word Clouds

Sharing graphically interesting pictures and images on your website and/or social platforms is an excellent way to capture someone’s attention. It helps make your content stand out.

One great technique you should consider using is creating a Word Cloud. This is simply a graphic made up of text from articles you have written. The text is analyzed by the program, and a graphic of the words used in the text is created.

The resulting graphic gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in your text. Each of the sites allows you to tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images that are created are yours to use however you like.

As you can see from the example below, the text is placed in the graphic with different types of fonts and sizes based on how often the word is used. There are several online resources that you can use to create the graphic.

Two websites I have explored are WordClouds.com and Wordle.net. Both of these sites are free to use.

They work in a similar manner.

1. Add your text to the site. This could be as easy as copying and pasting the text into the provided window, uploading a document, or providing a URL of a web page.
2. Adjust the settings. Both sites allow you quite a bit of flexibility in the settings that you can adjust. This includes the fonts and font size, graphic resolution, the amount of gap between words, creating particular shapes, and changing colors, to name just a few.
3. Select the background image. You can use a generic background image or upload your own.
4. Save the picture. You can save the image in a variety of graphic formats that can be utilized in a print publication and/or online.

I always think it is helpful to be able to use a variety of images, and Word Clouds tend to do a good job of catching people’s attention.

Have you ever created a word cloud? How have you used them? Let me know.