Word Clouds

I recently completed an interesting workshop at Waukesha County Technical College: Your Business Story – Writing to Sell. Reji Laberje, a successful author, writing coach, and business owner, taught the workshop. Along with about 35 other budding authors and small business entrepreneurs, I picked up several good tips for improving my marketing messages.

The concept I found most interesting was Word Clouds. Although I’d seen them before, most commonly in their tag cloud variant, I’ve never really worked with them. You see a sample word cloud from Wikipedia at the beginning of this post.

Having learned about word clouds, I wanted to experiment with them. The first step was to find suitable software to create a word cloud. The solution turned out to be the Android Word Cloud app, which I ran on a Chromebook capable of running Android apps.

Here are two word clouds I created:

The above Lighthouse word cloud was created for use on my Lights of the Lakes web site.

The Consulting word cloud was used as the header image on the Consulting page on this site.

Word clouds are fun to play with. They pack a lot of meaning into a visual message. I’m glad I learned how to make them!