For all my fellow word nerds out there… If you haven’t discovered Wordle yet, it’s a must, particularly if you also love typography and layout. Nerd heaven.

From wordle.net:
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. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

For example, below is a wordle I just created in less than two minutes, using some of my favorite lyrics.

Facebook Fans…Free gift to the first Sproutreach FBF to provide the correct artist and song title (via FB comment).

My father (Thomas J. Gough) was a psychologist by profession. Perhaps because of his quest to better understand and help people, and/or as a result of being the son of an award-winning graphic artist, he had an acute sense of the power of words, particularly when written on paper.

Consequently, my father chronicled much of his life’s discoveries, thoughts, and inspirations on little bits of colorful paper. These paper scraps, many of which were on Post-it Notes (after 1980), were stuck in books, his office, or carried about in his briefcase or wallet.

Above are a few of my favorites, with messages I find meaningful to my life and work as a graphic designer.

1) A single word, compassion, scribbled on a well-traveled note, torn and scotch-taped in repair

2) A quote from art-historian Aby Warburg, God dwells in detail

3) a note jotted down while listening to an audio tape from the library of Widener University, where my father taught in the ’80s, RE Words: the mythology…According to many ancient myths, when primordial sound took the form of words, our world was born!

Thanks Dad. I miss you.