Wordle-ing words

I love words. I love playing with words. I love what they can do.

It's not simply the sounds they make when spoken or sung aloud, or all the wonderful complexity and nuance of meaning that one can achieve and communicate by stringing them together. It's not just the ability that they have to reach across space (and time) to entertain or inspire me. Or how they can evoke or create worlds, even those that have never existed but still feel real enough to inhabit. It's not only how they can bring someone at a distance close enough that I feel I might touch them. It's what they look like too.

I find I am really drawn to arts and crafts that incorporate text, and it's the meaning as well as the aesthetic that appeals to me. I often include text in my own art works and when I look at my etsy favourites, for example, I find the following...


1. Desire necklace, 2. Laugh often tiny text bowl, 3. Need some Joy ID tag necklace, 4. Chipboard buttons

I am also a bit of a font addict (well, we all have our vices!) and I'm repeatedly struck by how the meaning of words can be subtly affected by what they look like. A font can be playful or arty or serious and imbue the formatted words with some of these characteristics too.

Not long ago I came across this site, which asked that I enter some text and then produced this lovely word cloud:


And then this one.
Different look, subtly different feel. It's such fun. I could play for hours.

There is also a wonderful place on the Web that collects photographic images of words found on the streets and is creating a visual dictionary. I had fun combining pictures into phrases and playing with this too. How cool are these?


1. Create - Washington 2006, 2. Beauty - Brighton 2008


1. Love - 2006, 2. And - Cape Town 2006, 3. Joy - London 2007,

Some would argue that there are other languages, like dance and music and visual art, that are able to communicate even more profoundly than words. And perhaps they are right. But I wouldn't want to be without them.