Wordaizer

Creating stunning and meaningful word clouds can certainly be an art. Wordaizer makes mastering this art both simpler and faster by automating all the boring bits without taking away all the fun.

Everything that has to do with the fonts, the colors, the size, and even with the shape of your word cloud is fully customizable and left to your creativity. To top it all off, Wordaizer lets you add motion to your word clouds or “wordlets”, as they like to call them.

These “wordlets” are becoming more and more popular. Word clouds are not just an original or a more artistic way of presenting word-based information – they can convey meaning to it by applying a specific size and color to those words that appear more frequently in the text, by giving the entire design the shape of a certain object, or by combining both wisely. Wordaizer comes with all the tools you need to create word clouds in a precise and customized way.

Believe it or not, the “Text” tab is – to me – the most important of the three tabbed sections in the program’s interface. Here is where you add meaning to your wordlet by feeding it with the right words. You can simply paste any text in the box provided and let the program’s algorithms decide what’s best for you, or you can come here and define which and how many words and characters will be used and which won’t, their font, their case, their color, etc. Here is where you add a creative touch to the cold calculations made by the program about which and how many words, symbols, or other characters appear in the text and how frequently. The more they appear, the bigger and the more prominently they will be displayed in the word cloud. You can leave out some or all special characters or use nothing but them to create your wordlets; remove very common (yet less meaningful) words like “the”, “for, “and”, etc., from the list; define the maximum number of words to be taken from the text, and how many different fonts you want the graphic to have.

The Mask tab will define the shape of your word cloud. The program comes with a predefined set for you to choose from, but you can always draw your own or import new ones. To make your word clouds even more unique, you can tell the program to add motion to them and see how the different words find their place in the cloud, a feature that you won’t find easily in other similar tools.

Wordaizer has been designed to be of use for all, though mastering some of the most sophisticated features may require you to check the manual every now and then. It is free and fully functional for a number of “grace days” – after that period you can still use it without paying, but some of its features will be disabled. It supports all the most widely used image file formats, including EMF for oversized word clouds.