Supercool

Fetching facts

16 Aug 2010

Categories: Data design, Useful/interesting,

When we decided to revamp our website, the very first consideration was; content. What exactly are we going to populate the site with?

New case studies? Definitely. More about some of our extra-curricular projects? Of course. But also, a better explanation of what it is we do and what it is we care about. And that's where it got tricky.

After countless drafts and redrafts, false starts and random notes, we were left with a load of blurb to explain what Supercool's all about … but in a convoluted, wordy, complicated, no-one's-going-to-read-all-this format.

"How can we use this and have it be useful? Arrrrgh! Oh, hang on; let's make a Wordle. Yay!" is pretty much how it went.

Wordle takes prose and makes it into (usually) pretty word clouds, with the most frequently used words the biggest. A very good way to get a general, digestible overview from lots of wordy, essay-length notes.

There are plenty of excellent information visualisation tools out there, some of our favourites being: Wordle, of course; Spezify, which takes your keyword/s and shows you copy, images and links related to it; Google Charts, which visualises HTML data and makes charts; this nameless thing which visualises the structure of websites … ummm, and there must be loads more. What've I missed?!

Our Supercool Wordle's housed on the About page, and the one pictured here is made from this very blog post. So, hooray for visualised data – oh, and if you like prettified statistics, you'll love Information is Beautiful.

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