Smart graphics for visual people
The interesting problem of fitting words into arbitrarily-sized rectangular areas has been lurking in the dark corners of my D:\ drive for a while now. Today I decided to do something about it, and offer you a cool SmartShape to create interesting visuals with.
The area-filling text shape lends itself to creating Word Clouds and graphics that use text in a matrix- or tabular style.
Tweet, tweet! Twitter is getting REAL BIG. No one is sure exactly what it is or…why. Attention deficit disorder gone nuts? The best source of at-the-moment trends? Customer data goldmine? Are we turning into chirping birds?
And all across the net, it’s raining word clouds! Clumps of words, where each has a different font-size or color to emphasize importance or frequency. Arranged this way and that to fill up the space, or to make a cool design. You’ll see them on blogs and on data-visualization sites everywhere.
Recently, occasional Visio-poster and creative guy in-general Saveen Reddy sent me an e-mail informing me that he had brought Twitter and Word Clouds together in the Visio arena.