I stumbled across a cool website called Wordle earlier and couldn’t resist trying it out.

From their website: ‘Wordle is 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.’

Here is a ‘Wordle’ I created using keywords from our studio management system. Based on the tags we give each and every project at IE, a cool display like the one below is generated.

A wordle generated using tags we give our work

You can even give Wordle a website URL and it’ll generate an image using feeds automatically discovered in the page:

Generated from our news and blog feeds

Head on over to Wordle and have a go!

Hello Digital runs next week, and I for one am looking forward to some interactive insights into the world of serious gaming, something that we at IE have a proud track record in. I’ll be at the Gaming Gets Serious seminar and I’m looking forward to hearing from Geoff Henderson from the Digital Native Academy, Kam Memarzia and of course Matt Dunn from fish in a bottle.

Some other good stuff planned too, including the regional launch of 4IP.

You’ll no doubt remember some of the duller moments at school where the most interesting use of time is spent, ahem, either creating or reading the graffiti on the edge of the desk you are sitting at. Well now the opportunity for some truly super graffiti or maybe even some amazing learning opportunity is about to make its mark. Anthea Linsett reports on a new type of learning platform (if you’ll excuse the pun) in the Guardian.

'Star Trek' style computer desks

At IE Design we’re passionate about interactive education and this medium certainly provides an interesting design challenge for the future - is it more than just an interactive whiteboard on a table, and if so, how should content and applications be designed to be used on it?

With the 360|Flex conference at the beginning of last week came several announcements for new and exciting stuff that is coming in Flex 4 (and CS4).

The Next Dimension of Rich Experiences (360|Flex Keynote) Mark Anders

As this video alone is over an hour long, I thought I’d summarize some of what I think are the most interesting advancements below.

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With the Olympics in full swing, many of us have been inspired to dust off our bicycles, running shoes, or leotards (!) but for the designers/developers among us it also inspires something else… The need to create cool and/or useful things around it based, of course, on the latest technology - in this case AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) applications.

AIR allows you to build desktop-based applications from web-based technologies like Flash, Flex, HTML and JavaScript. There are a few AIR apps that have been around for some time now and are becoming increasingly well known - such as eBay Desktop and the Google Analytics reporting tool (by Nicholas Lierman).

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