This text-only record is part of the interactive AIGA Design Archives where you can view more details, zoom into images and explore other works in the definitive online resource on American design.
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Design Category
Information design, 2003
Design firm
Flaming Toast Productions, LLC (Shelburne, Vermont)
Collection
(2004) AIGA 365: 25
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WordCount (www.wordcount.org) is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the less common it is.
WordCount data currently comes from the British National Corpus (BNC), a 100-million-word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent an accurate cross section of current English usage. WordCount includes all words that occur at least twice in the BNC. In the future, WordCount will be modified to track word usage within any desired text, website, and eventually the entire Internet.
WordCount was designed with a minimalist aesthetic, to let the information speak for itself. The interface is clean, basic and intuitive. The goal is for the user to feel embedded in the language, sifting through words like an archaeologist through sand, awaiting the unexpected find. Observing closely ranked words tells us a great deal about our culture. For instance, “God” is one word from “began,” two words from “start,” and six words from “war.” As ever, the more one explores, the more is revealed.
Overall, great design elements. Lovely typography, minimal use of color, a fun idea. You become obsessed with finding words because the design is so good; you want to keep searching just to watch the design work.