Design Tips to Create Decorative Tag Clouds

Create Decorative Tag Clouds

Most seasoned web 2.0 readers may be familiar with the concept of a tag cloud. For those who are unaware, a tag cloud or tag cloud is a visual representation of the words that make up a text, where those words that appear more frequently in the text are displayed in a larger size. On websites, tag clouds are used to display the most frequently covered topics based on the size of the tag in the cloud. However, these representations are also often used within articles in image format, to decorate or visually illustrate the topic addressed. 

In this article, we present a free online tool that allows you to create tag clouds from the text or words that we indicate: Tagxedo. It is a very complete and easy-to-use application that quickly helps us design a custom tag cloud that can then be printed, used in a presentation, or shared on a website or blog. Tagxedo makes it possible to create tag clouds from text text text, a list of words that we provide, a specific URL, Twitter accounts, Delicious accounts, RSS, and search terms. The tool ranks words according to the frequency in which they appear, assigning them size in the cloud according to their importance within the text. Similar words are unified and common words are discarded. 

Tagxedo has various configuration options in terms of text orientation (horizontal, vertical diagonal), fonts, colors, and cloud shape (there is a gallery of default options to choose from or you can upload your image). In this sense, we can choose the combination that best suits the theme of our text and thus find the perfect accompanying image. The created images can be saved in JPEG or PNG format, in different sizes. Also, in the Tagxedo gallery, you can search and download the works of art of other users. The application can be used without registering, it is only required to have installed the Microsoft Silverlight plugin to start creating decorative and aesthetic tag clouds. 

Here are some examples of tag clouds created with Tagxedo for inspiration: