I’ve been interested in information design for a long time, have read most of Edward Tufte’s books and recently started playing with data visualization. The idea of taking a heap of data that is otherwise meaningless in its raw form, making sense of it in some visually meaningful way, and especially making it beautiful, is really cool.
I came across Wordle while reading Beautiful Visualization. Wordle basically creates a tag cloud, then makes it a lot prettier:
