Word Cloud

Word Clouds, also called Tag Clouds or Typography, are a design aesthetic solely composed of keywords, their related words and ideas or concepts. They can represent a world family or a concept, or visually represent the words of a source text and its main ideas. The bigger a word is on a word cloud, the more importance it has to the source text or idea. Similiarly to ASCII art, word clouds can be used for a wide variety of things: they are often used on advertisements to represent the purposes and values of a company/website or to represent a concept, and other uses include art made out of words, cartography, maps, linguistics, representing the key ideas of a topic, studying, among many other uses.
==History==
The origin of World clouds can be traced back to the Milgran social experiments carried out by the psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s A brief history of Word Clouds | SurveyTutorials.com. In 1976, in one of the experiments, they made over 200 participants from Paris draw a map of said city, mentioning various local places or landmarks. Milgram & Jodelet wrote down the number of mentions of each Parisian landmark and compiled them into a map of Paris where each mentioned landmark appeared, but the most mentioned landmarks were represented as bigger words. World clouds became avaiable to a wider public online in the late 1990s and early 2000s and they were popularized among bloggers by the Flickr photo-sharing website. The popularity of World Clouds blew up in 2005 when the scientifist Jonathan Feinberg created an algorithm that could generate word clouds out of tags. In 2008, the algorithm became publicly avaiable and Feinberg invented the Wordle.net, which could generate word clouds out of any word for its users.
==Visuals==
The visuals of the World Clouds are really simple. Their most common characteristics are:
*Text, keywords, related words and ideas/concepts
*Glossaries, art, maps, advertisements, and other concepts represented by words.
*Word size varies by the importance of the word.
==Media==
===Movies and television===
*HPI Opening credits
*Fringe Opening credits
===Musical Artists===
*MARETU
==External Links==
External links can help you get a better understanding of this aesthetic.
*Wordle.net
*WordArt.com
==Gallery==
===Concepts, cartography and linguistics===
WordCloud2.png|A word cloud about word clouds themselves
KnowledgeWordCloud.jpg|The concept of 'knowledge'
LanguageCloud.jpg|The word 'welcome' in various languages
WordCloudArt.png|Concepts related to Art class
WordCloudUSA.jpg|A word cloud representing the cities and states of mainland USA
WordCloudCartography.png|An example of word clouds being used in Cartography on a map of Texas
WorldMapCloud.jpg|The map of the world as a word cloud
WordCloudPopulation.png|A world cloud listing countries by population
===Symbols===
LightbulbWord.jpg|Lightbulb representing ideas
EuroWord.png|Euro currency
PandaWord.png|WWF Panda
IrelandWord.png|Saint Patrick's shamrock
BusWord.png|Bus
UFOWord.png|UFO
HeartWord.png|Heart representing love
YinYangWord.png|Yin Yang
===Word Cloud Art===
BobMarleyWord.jpg|Bob Marley word art
WordArt2.png
WordArt3.png
MonaLisaWordCloud.jpg|The Mona Lisa as a word cloud.
AudreyWord.png|Audrey Hepburn word art
ElvisWord.png|Elvis Presley word art
WordArt4.jpg
BruceWord.jpg|Bruce Lee word art
==References==
Category:Design Aesthetics
Category:2000s
Category:Visual
Category:1970s
Category:Corporate
Category:Art
Category:Web
Category:Electronic
Category:Y2K
Category:Internet Aesthetics
Category:Old web
Category:Colorful
Category:White
Category:Black
Category:Schools, bookstores, and libraries
Category:American
Category:Canadian