The Pocket Universal Methods of Design, Revised and Expanded

125	Word Clouds

Information visualization that organizes text-based content into interesting arrangements

• Word clouds are text collages that show the most frequently used words in just about any text-based document.
• Words are assigned different font sizes; usually, the bigger the word, the more frequently it occurs.
• Clouds are made engaging through various dimensions such as typeface, font size, colors, and number of words, word proximity, and word orientation.
• Qualify where word cloud data came from, collection methods, what the fonts, colors, sizes, etc. mean, and disclosure of any data scrubbing or segmenting.
• When archiving transcripts, the visual markers of each cloud create a gestalt unique to each transcript that can facilitate ...