What’s a Word Cloud?
Word Cloud is an image with words. You turn words into stunning images, like this:
Beautiful Word Cloud on Tagxedo
I use Word Clouds regularly for teaching and learning new vocabulary. If you’re a visual learner like me, Word Cloud is a powerful tool. Recently, I’ve learnt some new words about tea tasting and tea culture, so I’ve turned some tasters’ jargon into images.
Today, I’m going to show you 5 easy steps to create your own stunning Word Cloud with a magnificent web tool called Tagxedo. Tagxedo is my favourite as it supports European languages and exotic languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic.
Tutorial: Turning words into a stunning Word Cloud:
1) Go to Tagxedo, click on the word Create – You’ll find ‘Create’ is on the left and on the top of the page.
1) Click on the word ‘Create’
2) You’ll get to this page (see below). Click on the word Load on the left.
2) Click on the word ‘Load’
3) In the big box next to the words Enter Text, enter all the words you want to appear in the final image. Advice: Type all the words in advance on a document, then Copy and Paste the words onto this space. Now hit the Submit button.
3) Enter words, then hit the ‘Submit’ button
4) After 4 seconds, you’ll see a stunning image, created using the words you’ve just entered, like this.
4) A stunning word cloud is created in 4 seconds for you.
5) If you’re happy with this image, SAVE it now on your computer. Click on Save/Share/Print to save your image on your own computer as a JPG file.
5) Click on where it says Save/Share/Print to SAVE your image.
I normally choose the size of 2mp for my Word Cloud.
Save as a JPG file. I normally choose the size of 2mp.
Success! You’ve now created a stunning Word Cloud. Congratulations!
Note 1: After step 3, be bold, be creative! You’ll try other features, won’t you? Try changing Colour, Theme, Font, Orientation and SHAPE — your creativity is boundless.
Your creation will amaze you.
Note 2: The size of the words on your Word Cloud depends on their frequency of appearance. For example, if you want the word WORDPRESS to appear larger on your image, you need to enter the word WORDPRESS many times. The higher the word frequency is, the larger the word becomes.
For example, I inserted the word WORDPRESS many times in my tea-related vocabulary list.
Can you find WORDPRESS?
I’ve played with some features, and now I’ve got different images using the same words that I used for the first image in this post:
Soooo talented. I will try it out.
I hope you’ll have a go and share your creation with us. Creating word cloud is very straightforward. Tagxedo is very user-friendly. I like using it. Good luck!
Thank you for the wordcloud tutorial – this is a grand idea.
It only takes a few minutes to make a stunning image. Hope you like it.
Hi Janet! Great tutorial. Just went to their site to play around, but it’s asking me to install it when I clicked Create? Is that supposed to happen?
Very strange. I’ve never come across this issue. You don’t need to download any software. Could you try again? You’ll love Tagxedo.
Hi. Just did it again and it’s still asking me to install.
I really wanted to try this.
Very strange. Please ask Tagxedo. It is not a program running on your computer. You just use it as a web tool, like the program you used for designing your header. I’m just as confused as you with your Tagxedo question. Let me know. Please show us your creation later.
I’ll see what I can do. It’s coming up to download Silverlight which I’ve seen with some app before. I’ll let you know.
Hi AJ’s mom,
I used a brand new computer yesterday and strangely, it also asked me to install Silverlight. I installed it and immediately I could access Tagxedo and continue with my other creations.
Good luck!
Hey Janet,
Thanks for letting me know. Was thinking of giving the download ago yesterday – will do it later on and will give you a nudge of my creations.
By the way, thanks for linking me up on your post!
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I’m going to see if I can figure out how to do this. Very cool. You are a woman of many talents by the way.