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.

Blogs, Blogs Everywhere

The other day my sister asked me to help her design and upload a customized blog header for her blog, Life on Laurel. She has been blogging for about 4 months now using Blogger and up until that time, she had only used a text header provided for the template she selected as her blog theme.

When she first asked me to help her do this, I asked her what she had in mind. She indicated that she wanted something with a street sign from Laurel Street as the main image. My first design was a good attempt, but it was neither symbolic nor meaningful.

So I searched through images and found one of a sidewalk with the word Laurel in decorative tile in the concrete. If you have never been to New Orleans, then you might not know that many of the streets feature their names in the sidewalks at the intersections. Anyway, I took the image and added the other text using Photoshop CS3. The whole process took only 30 minutes. The hardest part was trying to get the colors to match the theme of the blog template my sister selected.

This is the final version of the new blog header I created for
my sister’s blog. She asked me to help her design a customized
header the other day. 30 minutes later, I came up with this.

Once I finalized the design, adding it to her blog was easy. So, for those of you who want to know how to do customize your Blogger header using an image, here are the steps (shown for a Mac; PC steps may be slightly different):

1. Log into your Blogger account
2. Go to your Dashboard
3. For the blog you want to customize, click the ‘Layout’ link
4. In the Header box, click the ‘edit’ link
5. Under Image, click the ‘Choose File’ button
6. Browse to the image file you want to use and click ‘Choose’
7. Under Placement, click the ‘Instead of title and description’ radio button
8. Click ‘Save’
9. Now you can click the ‘Preview’ button to see what your new header will look like
10. Finally, click ‘Save’

That’s it... you’re done! Wasn’t that easy? There is one thing you should know before uploading an image though. The standard Blogger header width is reportedly 660 pixels. The idea being that if size your image to approximately this width, it will fill the entire header. When I did this, however, the image overlapped the header border on the right side. I could have selected the ‘Shrink to fit’ option when uploading the image, but I didn’t want to let the software determine how the image would look. Instead, I downsized the image to 650 pixels wide and re-uploaded it. When I did that, the image fell entirely within the border.

Why is this design so much more symbolic and meaningful? I’m glad you asked. The symbolism comes from a play on words. The title of the blog is Life on Laurel and if you look at the design, the words “Life on” are on the word “Laurel”, which is a play off of the title. Secondly, the words “Life on” only touch the first two letters “LA”, which is the abbreviation for Louisiana, because while the blog is about life in New Orleans, it is also about life as a Louisianian. The meaning comes from the fact that it is an image from Laurel Street and not something artificially created. So, the new design satisfies both characteristics very well.

The bottom line is customizing your blog is not that hard. In fact, it’s downright easy and it gives your blog an identity of its own, separating you from the crowd. According to Technorati, there are 112.8 million blogs. The even more amazing statistic is that there are 175,000 new blogs created everyday. So, you can see that adding a touch of customization to your blog might help to distinguish yours from the plethora of others.

Speaking of blogs, there are several others I follow. Most are from professional photographers and graphic designers, which I will blog about later, but some blogs I follow are from my friends. I would like to mention two in this post specifically. First, Piper Kinney Photography has a great blog where she shows off some of her recent work as well as discussed things that are going on in her life. She specializes in on location, natural light, children and family photography based in Humble, Texas. If you are looking for a very artistic and creative child photographer, check out Piper Kinney Photography. Second, Jackie’s Magic is a very interesting blog created by a very soulful and thoughtful person. Her posts are compelling and thought provoking. Interestingly enough, I designed Jackie's blog header as well. Both blogs should be added to your “Things I need to check out regularly” list.