“X” Marks The Spot! #16

X Marks The Spot

18. Aug. 2008

By Le Vin Chin

Tag clouds and word clouds are a fun part of our 2.0 landscape – enabling a visitor to grasp, instinctively and almost instantaneously, what a website is all about. There are a few cloud generators on the internet, but we’d highlight wordle.net, with which we created all the word clouds illustrating this month’s “X” Marks The Spot! Each word cloud below was created using a previously published article on XYMARA.com. See if you can guess which articles we used to create the five word clouds – as a special treat, the first correct reply – identifying all five – we get in our Contact Us mailbox will receive a free entrance ticket to 100% Design in London, where we’ll be presenting the winners of our young designer’s competition, the XYMARA™ Design Award!

“X” Marks The Spot! in XYMARA.com …

… see if you can guess which article generated this word cloud – and win a free ticket to 100% Design! Details above. Word cloud generated by wordle.net. Click on the picture for a larger view.

We’ve mentioned the Color Marketing Group in passing, a few times. They are, of course, the pre-eminent worldwide color and trend forecasting association, composed of color stylists from all the major companies (and many of the smaller ones too!). The Color Marketing Group’s chapters hold regular meetings (bi-annual in North America, once a year in South America, Asia and Europe) to workshop together trend colors up to three years into the future – and this daring timescale of course gives them a prominent voice in the business of color trending. Ciba was proud to be a sponsor of this year’s European meeting.

Another group who plows the same field are The Color Association of the United States, who operate with a much more focussed process, working on trending with tighter groups of experts.

We’re also continuing to discover new web resources on color, for people who work with color. Hot on the heels of the sites featured in “X” Marks The Spot! #14 comes Coloroot, which has a library of color articles and bills itself as a platform for exchange of knowledge on color.

Of course we’re all focussed on the Olympics in Beijing at the moment: the opening ceremony was amazing and Ciba is proud to have been involved as well, in our own small way! Back in the world of design, we found the approach that Coke has put into their involvement quite interesting: eight new, themed, bottle designs by Chinese graphic designers, each launched with accompanying CDs. Packaging News has the full story and the official Coca Cola website has the background details on the project, as well as all the company’s other Olympics initiatives.

We’ve featured MetalFX before: their technology allows a printer using a traditional five-color press to print an infinite number of metallic shades, inline. While their technology is compatible with all standard publishing and proofing software, there are still whole worlds of new design possibilities to discover – which is why MetalFX also run workshops for graphic designers. The next ones are scheduled for September-October in the UK – check out the details here.

And, lastly, this month’s cool design blog is Design Milk whose fun features speak for themselves. If you want to get into the design blogging game, they are apparently looking for new contributors …

More Information

Comments on this article

no comments available

“X” Marks The Spot! #16

Comments on this article

Send a friend