Designing with Wordle
Recently I’m reading Beautiful Visualization, which shows a glance of how visualization presents the data elegantly.
Long before tools like flash, processing and javascript appear, people have been exploring typographic creation in media art for a long time. Undoubtedly, the first inspiration of wordle arised from typography.
In the 1990s, wordle made up of chinese character has already existed to lift elements from the picture for emphasis in Neon Genesis Evangelion(my favorite Japanese science fiction anime).
Besides irregular form of wordle, the periodic table of elements shows a neat form of wordle based on chemical properties. The common purpose of forms is: love at first sight.
Pictures: Upverter periodic table of HW engineering
In the table, Seeed Studio was labeled as “PCB MFG in China”, actually, that was just part of Seeed: the Fusion/Propagate provide PCB Services. We are dedicated to providing accessible technology and agile manufacturing, to help makers grow inspirations to differentiating products.
After learning the Wordle in Chapter 3, I decided to make a visualization for Seeed.
Introducing Wordle
Wordle stands for “word clouds”, created by Jonathan Feinberg, explained as “the gateway drug to textual analysis”. It’s simple and powerful even for those who have never heard of Information Visualization, aka infographic.
The service is online at wordle.net; you can create or use the infographics shared by others.
The basic usage is one click mothod: input the text or url. I tried seeedstudio.com and seeedstudio.com/blog.
After this, in advanced process, you can change the font, layout, color, and the rotation of text etc. What’s more, the weight of the words can be specific, making your desired pictures.
Here are some mutants created with url.
From the above-shown pictures, we can catch a glance of Seeed Studio.
- PCB, BGA: Fusion service
- NFC, W5500, I2C: the common technology in Software/Hardware
- Grove, Xadow, Galileo, Kits: Products on bazaar
You can also Google to find lots of similar web apps to create wordle. Another alternative one I recommend is Tagcrowd. It’s less powerful but it could also create with url, thus helping you focus on the key points of a website.
The design of Seeed name card
Creation with url is simple, but it also brings a problem: noise in signal. The weight of words are counted in the front page of the site, rather than deep into site content in Google’s way. Besides this, name card is not big enough to carry too much information; we need a lite pack of keywords to produce the wordle.
The first version comes with an old one I created months ago, which tells the hackathons of ATT & Seeed.
Here’s the source file:
[c]
app
application
ATT ATT ATT
code
community community community
development
developer
build
seeedstudio seeedstudio seeedstudio
event
hack hack
solution
programming programming programming
idea
hackathon hackathon hackathon hackathon
products
health
contest contest contest
science
education
wearables wearables wearables
chaihuo
workshop workshop
[/c]
During the design of new name card of Seeed, we finally decided to put a wordle which can present the characteristics of Seeed. We selected the following words:
[c]
+ add
Industry Design
homebrew
IOT
Innovate
China
Seeeduino
Shenzhen2U
Maker4Makers Maker4Makers Maker4Makers Maker4Makers
CNC
agile agile agile
manufacture manufacture manufacture
OPL
Fusion
3D Printing
ODM ODM ODM
PCBA PCBA
Shield Shield
app
Community community community
Developer
hack hack
solution
programming programming programming
idea
hackathon hackathon
products
wearables wearables wearables
chaihuo
workshop workshop
– delete
Wifi
gprs
humidity
eink
wearable
GPRS
Inject Molding
RF Explorer
Cable
Eink
science
education
DSO
Xadow
SBC
Laser Cutting
[/c]
After integrated with VI, here’s the one we use:
How do you like it? There’s still space for improvement. I’d rather choose a better algorithm to discovery the gene of us, despite all the artificial interference, but there is a long way to go.
To be continued.
Reference
Visualization is the graphic presentation of data — portrayals meant to reveal complex information at a glance. Think of the familiar map of the New York City subway system, or a diagram of the human brain. Successful visualizations are beautiful not only for their aesthetic design, but also for elegant layers of detail that efficiently generate insight and new understanding.
This book examines the methods of two dozen visualization experts who approach their projects from a variety of perspectives — as artists, designers, commentators, scientists, analysts, statisticians, and more. Together they demonstrate how visualization can help us make sense of the world.
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