When I was looking online on my new addiction for creative Halloween decorations I kept seeing what they called “subway art”. They looked pretty cool with Halloween words making a picture and some had a few Halloween icons in the picture as well. Well, it got me thinking about a website that I had learned about while teaching called Wordle. It makes what the site calls “Word Clouds”.
All you have to do is type or copy and paste text and then create your word cloud. I’m sure the ones that I saw online were made in Photoshop or something, but this site does something similar pretty quickly. With the site the more times a word is put into the text the larger it will appear compared to the other words. When I was first shown the site they showed some really cool ones that used famous speeches and documents. The ones I saw made me want to try it out with my Science Classes, but just never got it finished. So many ideas so little time. This time I thought I would actually use it and make my first Halloween decoration of the season!
So if you want to know how, this is what I did:
I used Word to type out the words, so I could do it in parts. Ian helped me think of any words that reminded him of Halloween. I made sure words like Halloween and Trick O Treat were on there multiple times, so they would stand out. Oh, one more thing if you want the words together you don’t want to use spaces, like "TrickOTreat". I did the same thing with October31 and blackcat. Once I had more time I was ready. (By the way click “Create” to get the page below to start). I copied and pasted my words from the Word doc.
Once you have the words in there you click “Go” and it creates your Word Cloud.
When it pulls up you can click at the bottom to “Open in Window” allowing you to see it a little easier, especially if you want to change it up some. Also at the bottom you can click “Randomize” and it will change up your Word Cloud. Instead of using the Random button I changed it on my own using the tabs at the top. Under “color” there are different options or you can custom your own. Just click on the squares once you have them pulled up and change the background and different word colors (it will give you a color spectrum to chose you color from). You can play with the “layout” changing the direction of the words and such. You can also play with the “font”, even “language” if you dare! Under the Language tab you can pick how you want the capitalization done and get rid of common words if you copied and pasted a paragraph.
Then I used orange construction paper and a white frame I had around the house. Now the frame didn’t look very Halloweenie, so I got some of the Halloween scrapbook stickers I had (they will come off the frame if I should want to use it for something else later) and decorated the frame.
Done! It was pretty easy! I’m pretty proud of myself since I’m usually not artsy-crafty. Also I love things on the computer where I don’t have to glue, cut, or do much by hand. Not very good with straight lines, hence the cutter I used above. Now that I’ve done it once, I’m sure I will use the site again!