What do your words say?

I am sure most of you know about word clouds or tag clouds by now. If not, they are representations of some body of text in the form of, well, a word cloud. It's hard to explain better than that, but essentially the word cloud is a bunch of words arranged in a cloud-like shape that show what words appear most often in some body of text. The larger the font of the specific word, the more often it appears in the text.

Why am I blogging about this you ask? Well, actually I follow a lot of people on Twitter. If you don't know what that is, check it out. I may blog about Twitter later, but for now let's focus on word clouds. So, the reason why I thought this would be a good blog post is because I saw one of my tweeps post a link to his word cloud and the name of the service he used to generate the word cloud. Now I have seen these types of services before, but this one is really easy to use and it gives you the ability to customize your cloud with a few simply clicks. The service is called Wordle. The great thing about this one is you can generate a word cloud of pretty much anything as long as you know the URL. Some services require the username and password of the account holder to do these types of things, but this one doesn't.

This is the word cloud from this blog (pwphotographer.blogspot.com).

I generated it yesterday using Wordle. I customized the layout to include

numerous colors, random angles, and a Roman-type font.

This is the word cloud from my sister's blog (lifeonlaurel.blogspot.com).

I generated it yesterday using Wordle. I customized the layout to include

four basic colors, straight angles, and a whimsical font.

So you can see from the images above that the word clouds can look quite different. And it only took me a few minutes to generate both of these word clouds. It's really a fun thing to do if you have a blog or follow someone regularly. Try it out and let me know what you think.

Copycat CDs and they aren't from China

If I offended anyone by the title of this post... too bad. It's a fact that China is one of the worst offenders when it comes to piracy of any type. Although CD piracy isn't as common as it once was, that activity is simply being replaced by other forms of media including DVDs and Internet music. But I digress...

The point of this post is to show you one of the CD covers I imitated using a photo I took of Stacy a few weeks ago. I mentioned in my post about the shoot that I was going to mock up several CD covers for her since she is a dancer that specializes in break dancing and is really into hip hop and rap music. The first cover I copied was Tupac's Best of Tupac Part 1: Thug CD. You can the original and the mock up below.

Original CD cover courtesy of Amazon.com

Mocked up CD cover (as if you needed to be told).

For the mock up, I had Stacy pose in a similar way. Then I completed the look in Adobe Photoshop. I used color adjustments to get the gold tone. I then created several layers to add the advisory label. Finally, I created a gradient for the title bar and added the text. Overall, I think it looks pretty close to the original. I plan to mock up the other CD covers in the next few weeks and I will post those as well. Let me know what you think!