Yvonne’s cheap, original last minute gift idea

It’s crunch time on the gift front, and if you’re low on cash and strapped for ideas, why not stick your head in the clouds. Word clouds, that is. Otherwise known as Wordles.

So, what’s a Wordle? It’s a visual depiction of a set of words that have been grouped together in a meaningful way.

Wordles are fun, personal and attractive. Most important of all, they’re easy to do!

Here’s a set of Wordles I made for Sandy to commemorate each of our nine books:

Pretty cool, huh?

To make these, I visited http://www.wordle.net/ and fed content from each book into the wordle application. Then I customized the color palette to match our book covers. The words we used the most showed up in the biggest font.

But you don’t have to have an entire manuscript on your hands to create a wordle. You can make a meaningful wordle for friends or a family just by using the lyrics of your best friend’s favorite song, or your mom’s favorite poem.

Check out this one I just made in honor of the holiday season:

To make your own wordle:

• Click CREATE
• Type in the words you want to use.
• Repeat the most important words several times so that they will be prominently featured in the word cloud.
• Click GO.

Wordle automatically removes common English words and numbers, so if you want these to appear, click on LANGUAGE and make your selections.

Click on FONT to customize the look. I used “Telephoto” for the book wordles and “Coolvetica” for my Christmas wordle.

Click on LAYOUT to rearrange words in a manner you find most appealing to the eye. I used half and half for the books wordles, with straighter edges, but rounder edges and mostly horizontal for the Christmas one. Once you’ve found the layout you like the most, you can hit “re-layout with current settings” to move the words around.

COLOR allows you to choose from a pre-existing palette, but you can customize the palette by selecting “edit custom palette.” Click on each sample color to change. Once you have selected your swatch color, you can hit OK to keep it, or enhance the shade a little by selecting HSB, and moving the little ball onto the specific shade you’d like. When you’re happy with your choice, hit OK and do the same thing for the rest of the four colors.

When you’re finished selecting your palette, you have one last choice. Hit the COLOR button again and at the bottom you see that you can select your exact palette, or vary it by several degrees.

Finally, you can save your wordle to the public gallery or print it. To make a PDF, select the PRINT button on the website page, and then select PRINT on your computer. Click on the PDF button to save and voila, you’re done!

If you like your work of art, stick it in a cheap frame to really make a statement. Or make a greeting card out of it.

Now… stop reading and start creating.