Have you ever come across a web tool that really catches your attention? When you see the results or evidence of the tool and are drawn to it, your mind wanders: That’s interesting. That’s unique. How did they do that?

If the user of the tool has honored the originator’s rules, it’s likely that the link for the tool, program, or widget is placed near the evidence of its work. Click on the link and explore the story of the object or widget. Those tools that capture your attention deserve a second look.

Recently, I received a branded email from one of my LinkedIn colleagues that had a colorful and playful wordle signature. What’s a wordle, you say? It is a great word cloud tools designed by IBM senior software engineer Jonathan Feinberg who works at the Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Lab of IBM Research.

According to the wordle website the tool is a cerebral web toy for adults—a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Let me the first to warn you: Wordle is highly addictive. The quest to “get it right” will have you hit the re-layout with current settings at least 100 times.

To learn more about Wordle’s creator and see evidence of a similar program, check out:

• Jonathan’s Wordle Blog. He’s one of the engineers who is comfortable with the words gestalt, aesthetics, “throw the stuff on the screen algorithm,” kind of language.
• The Computer Spotlight interview, Jonathan says “I’m interested in design and I have a respect for it, and I don’t know enough about it yet, so it’s kind of my life project slowly over time to apply those principles to my work.”
• The Wordle-like program that is used to compare the Presidential inaugural addresses. The results are graphically fascinating.

Have a bit of fun with words, colors, typography, layout, and hierarchy of information. Go do a wordle. Be one of over 200,000 people who’ve checked out wordle.com and have created their masterpiece.

Wordle has won both the Webby and the People’s Voice Webby for Best Use of Typography at the Webby awards

Read more posts by Donna Vincent Roa