Word Cloud Art!

Remember that "art project" I made for Dan Aykroyd to sign? Well, here 'tis:

(Click for the larger size)

I actually made two options, and was debating which one Dan should sign up until the very last minute. Here's the other one:

(I know, I know: I should have gone with this one. Maybe. Or not. I still can't decide.)

I'm sure you've seen word clouds before; there are several free sites out there that will scan your website and spit out the most frequently used words into a design like this. I've had some of you send in examples that used Epbot before, so while brain-storming something unique to bring Dan to sign I thought of making a Ghostbusters-themed cloud.

In addition to scanning websites, these cloud generators also allow you to cut and paste in large blocks of text, which is where I hatched the plan of manipulating the input text to get only the words and phrases I wanted in the cloud.

First I went through the Ghostbusters script and pulled out every line of dialogue Dan/Ray utters. From there I grabbed only the most relevant and/or interesting words, making sure to include my favorite phrases like "GET HER!" and a reference to the mass sponge migration.

(Another color variation.)

Once I had that block of raw text, I went through and selected which words and phrases I wanted to be larger than the rest. These bits I copied and pasted a few times over. (The more often a word appears in the input text, the larger it will be. See?)

Helpful Tip: To make the words in a phrase stay together, you have to use a ~ between them, with no spaces. Like~this. (And I'm not going to tell you how long it took me to find that symbol on my keyboard.) Sadly there's no way to make punctuation transfer, though.

Once that was done I plugged the whole mess of jibberish into Wordle (my free services of choice) and commenced playing. There are so many design options, from word orientation to fonts to custom color themes, that this took the bulk of my time. Not to mention IT IS VERY ADDICTING.

Wheee!!

The final obstacle was getting our printer to spit out something that looked even remotely like the colors I was seeing on screen. For some reason it dulled everything down to the point that you couldn't read some of the smaller words. (Grrr.) This is when I called in John, who took each file into Photoshop and bumped up the colors like crazy:

This made everything clear and legible, but sadly all my lovely muted pumpkin tones turned into neon carrots. I say again: GRRR.

Oh, sure, NOW you match the screen. JERK.

(I'm talking to my printer here, not Dan Aykroyd. I hope that's obvious, but you never know.)
Still, it was great fun to make, and Dan's signature looks nice on the black background. Besides, my office has so many crazy colors already that I doubt this will look too out of place.

Oh, and there's another word cloud generator called Tagxedo that looks even more fun than Wordle, but sadly I couldn't get it to work on my Mac. If you own a PC, though, Tagxedo allows you to shape your cloud into a star or heart or whatnot, which presents SO many more fun possibilities. (And technically it's *supposed* to work on most Macs, so maybe give it a try just to see regardless.)

Anyway, I'm pretty sure both sites allow you to save and print your own creations from home, so I highly encourage you to try them out. These would made great art pieces for kids' rooms (with their name in the largest font), or you could make fan art like I did for your favorite literary or movie characters! (I'm already working on companion pieces for Venkman & Spengler.)

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P.S. I have an extra glossy print of the colorful word cloud - the version Dan signed for me. Any of you want it? Let me know in the comments, and I'll pick someone in a few days.

{Update: Just to be clear, the extra print I'm giving away is *not* signed by Dan. I'm keeping that one. ;)}