Editor’s Note: Here is a contribution from Piotr Kowalczyk from Warsaw, Poland. We’ve had a previous contribution by him here. You can also find the below article on his website, Password Incorrect. Paul Biba
Wordle is a fantastic word cloud generator. Its creator, Jonathan Feinberg, has managed to do one great thing: with the selection of fonts, colors and a whole idea how the words are composed, the effect is far beyond the IT world. It already belongs to the world of art.
With Wordle it’s all fun. You enter URL address (f.e. of your blog) and get the cloud of most popular words used. You can also paste a text – and this is actually a possibility Wordle is giving to self-publishing authors. When a writer wants to publish an e-book, with a destination places like Feedbooks, Smashwords, Scribd and alikes, the prepress knowledge is not needed any more. In fact, in most cases the only missing part is just a jpeg picture with a catchy cover. And it doesn’t need to be hi-res CMYK file. One screenshot is enough.
Below there are some tips and examples of how to create it.
Example
Let me start with the example, let’s say children’s book. For a full control, I go to “Advanced” tab and place weighted words or phrases there. I’m inserting the marked title, author, subtitle and titles of the stories. Yes, with Wordle you can easily put the content of your book ON the cover.
Weights:
– Book title:700
– Author’s name:400
– Book’s descriptive subtitle: 300
– Story title:200
– Story title:150
– Story title:100
Layout options:
– Color scheme: BlueSugar – white background is always good for children’s books
– Font: Grilled Cheese BTN – this font is fancy enough
– Layout: Mostly Vertical – as Wordle is delivering word clouds in a horizontal window, choose this option and rotate the picture by 90 degrees later on.
The result:
Tips
:. The more words you provide, the better. It could be titles of the stories. It could be tags you usually use to describe the content. It could a title of a book repeated in different sizes. It could be even a pattern of symbols ($, @, *, ®). What you use is up to your imagination. Wordle will do the rest.
:. Instead of playing with advanced options, you can just paste a whole text of your story/novella under “Create” tab. How to make title and author the biggest elements? Just copy and paste them many times, leaving the rest of the text unchanged. Example: one of my stories – Mr Copypaste. Title x40, author x20.
:. Font suggestions:
– non-fiction: Telephoto, Gnuolane Free, Steelfish, League Gothic
– children’s books: Silentina Movie, Loved by the King, Berylium, Grilled Cheese BTN, Mail Ray Stuff
– romance: Sexsmith, Goudy Bookletter 1911, Powell Antique
– science-fiction: Tank Lite, Gunplay
As soon as you start playing with Wordle, I’m sure you get extremely inspired. Wordling a cover for your own book can be as much fun as writing it.
