Thursday, 30 August 2012

Cloudy

There are these things called word clouds, which are various graphical representations of the concordance of a text. For example, here's one for this very blog, in the shape of a dog (click for a readable version).



Somebody (Thunder Bay Press/Canterbury Classics) has hit on the idea of using these to make the covers for their Word Cloud Classics reprints. Each book has significant words and phrases lifted out and arranged in the covers. It's a simple idea, and done quite nicely. I'm not sure they're my cup of tea, but they look quite appealing.







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4 comments:

  1. Ian Koviak30 August 2012 at 22:45

    thats very cute. I like it as an idea, but not sure if I'd like it as something on my personal shelf. But it's clever.

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  2. Nigauw31 August 2012 at 08:04

    As cute as these covers are, these are NOT "Word Clouds", just arbitrarily selected significant pieces of text nicely arranged by the designer.
    Word (or Tag) Clouds are a visualization of the statistical frequency (or some other prioritization rule) of words in a body of text (or site).

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  3. JRSM31 August 2012 at 16:49

    That's true. I wonder if they started doing that, and then decided lifting relevant phrases out and arranging them similarly was more effective?

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  4. Anonymous1 September 2012 at 20:31

    Uck. These just seem lazy to me.

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