Wonderful Wordle

My friend, Aimee, told me about Wordle.  I'd read about it somewhere - I think Creating Keepsakes magazine, but I hadn't ever tried it out.  But Aimee said that it was really cool, so I went on the Wordle website and "wordled" my way into making this.

It's a word collage using tons of words that I've written on my blog.  Cool, right?  What's even cooler is that it was so easy.  All I did was click a few buttons, and boom!  Wordle made me a wonderful collage of words.

Now, granted, an automatic collage generator like Wordle doesn't give you all the flexibility that creating something like this in an Adobe program would, but it has numerous perks.  Here are a few reasons I think Wordle can be a very good thing:

• It's quick and easy.  You would spend a good long time trying to make a "just right" word collage in Adobe, but Wordle lets you do it in a couple minutes.
• Is relatively flexible.  Even though Adobe would win the contest on the amount of options it gives you, Wordle actually has a pretty satisfactory variety of fonts and colors to choose from.  The font I used on my collage was Coolvetica, in case you were wondering.
• It's fun.  Playing with words and colors is just plain enjoyable. 
• It allows you to let go of perfectionism.  Since the arrangment of words is random, you can't necessarily make everything "just so."  Even though it can be good at times to have high standards, it also can be really freeing to not have to worry about that and just let the computer do the work.

Here's one more tip before you go off to play around: Wordle doesn't let you save your creation as a JPG image, but you can take a screenshot (Alt + Prnt Scrn) and paste that into Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or even a Microsoft program like Word or Publisher to save and print.  That's what I did with my creation to make it easy to post.

I hope you enjoy experimenting with Wordle!  And if you, like Aimee, have an idea of some graphics-related thing I might like, please let me know!  I may just end up doing a post about it.

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Update on the Teen Talent Competition: the voting is closed, but the winner hasn't been announced yet.  I thought it was going to be announced today, but I think I passed on mistaken information!  I'm sorry about that, and I'll let you know the results of the contest when I hear.