By Lisa A

Are you looking for a captivating and easy-to-use tool to add to your display, poster-making and online repertoire?

Try Tagxedo, a free tool, which allows you to arrange words (like a tag cloud) into cool shapes. With a wide range of available shapes, fonts and colour schemes, it is a flexible and addictive tool.

You can use text you make up, text from your own tweets or blogs, or any text that is not copyright. Creative Commons have a directory of CC text sources. 

The example below uses text from our Sail into summer reading course promotion.

Tagxedo provides existing shapes to work with and gives you the option of creating your own from photos or shapes.  Check out the gallery  for ideas. To make the Tagxedo below, I typed in 700 as the shape and then added words reflecting topics found in the 700 section of Dewey.

To get started:

• click Create
• select a shape
• wait for it to load
• select a theme (colour scheme)
• once loaded you can change the font if you wish
• add text; click Load and either load a url or type in your own text
• save, share or print your product!

Further information and tips for using Tagxedo can be found in the FAQs and on their blog