Universal Methods of Design

SYNTHESIS / ANALYSIS TECHNIQUE • RESEARCH DELIVERABLE

100 Word Clouds

Word clouds are a method of information visualization that organizes text-based content into interesting spatial arrangements.¹

Word clouds are “colorful word collages”² that show the most frequently used words or word pairs in just about any text-based source document. In a word cloud, words are assigned different font sizes based on word frequency—usually, the bigger the word, the more frequently it occurs in the source document. As a visual summary of the textual data, the word cloud serves a function akin to a table of contents for a book—it provides the reader with enough ...