Wednesday, April 22, 2009

How did you do that?


Have you heard about a nifty applet that allows you to take running text and create a word "picture"? While saving the randomly generated design is a bit complicated without a postscript printer that will save it to a .gif or .jpg image, you can get around that problem by printing the screen, and then scanning the wordle.

The collage above is the first I created using layers in Photoshop, a powerful program I'd had for years but didn't use much beyond resizing pictures. However, desperate people do desperate things, I'm told, and if I wanted to integrate a Wordle into a card, I was going to have to learn how to work with "layers."

Have you seen how huge software manuals have become with their impossibly small print and B&W screenshots? Mine gather dust until they become outdated and are finally tossed. However, I found a magazine on digital scrapbooking at Borders that launched me easily into the wonderful world of Photoshop. The two-page projects featured simple, numbered steps and glorious pictures. Layers were a mystery no more!

If you would like to try your hand at creating a wordle, go to http://www.wordle.net/ and play with it. Let me know what you think!



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