When making presentations or developing websites, I feel it is very time consuming to find images under Creative Commons Licensed or from Public Domain. After spending hours of searching on Google with “Labeled for reuse”, pixabay and openclipart, I think I may contribute a little on creating your own Word Cloud Images.

The most frequently used website is wordle.net. I used it to create the School Data Analysis image below for one of my presentations. It is now shared to the public gallery so everyone can use it:

School Data Analysis

Wordle is easy and it is the very first app of its kind. However, when I tried to create a “Thank You” word cloud in different languages, the problems came:

Problem 1: Wordle doesn’t work well across different language. I used this page as the resources and typed in 25 types of “thank you” in different languages.

Unfortunately, Wordle wasn’t able to recognize all of them. Many of them showed up as blank squared blocks. I tried to set the font as “Chrysanthi Unicode” as instructed in this article, it didn’t work.  Tried all other fonts, none of them worked for all languages.

Problem 2:

I wanted more than just a random piled words/phases in a meaningless shape. I wanted something more meaningful, something like this, but with the words of “Thank You” instead:

Picture retrieved at http://funzim.com/10-cool-facts-love/

Wordle doesn’t do this, at least for now.

So I googled and found this site:

http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html

I would say I am very satisfied with the outcome:

1. It was able to recognize all types of languages

2. It gives plenty of cool shapes to frame your words in.

So the final products I had are these:

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License @ Tagxedo

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License

There are more variations in Tagxedo. Try it yourself and you can create so many interesting word clouds with CC license for your own non-commercial presentation use.