Wednesday 28 December 2011

Thank You

Two little words - but so important!  Here in the blogging world I often come across people who strive to add a little "Today I am grateful for ..." sentence to the end of their posts.  Some of you spend a whole month displaying a really keen attitude of gratitude.  It's good to reflect on what we have rather than want we think is missing (most of which we could manage without).

Today it's my 2nd Guest Post over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog and it's all about saying "Thank you" - or rather it's about sending gratitude in a Thank You card!  Over there I've shared some card inspiration to make things a little more interesting (without eating up too much of my/your precious time) - and I also linked from there back to here because I wanted to help make this card:


It's made using Tagxedo which regular readers will know that I love ... but if you have spent less time fiddling with it than I have, you may need some short-cuts to making a similar card (no point in re-inventing the wheel eh?!).

I loaded the following words:
merci danke~schön arigato tack~så~mycket muchas~gracias
спасибо dziękuję obrigado grazie toda~raba mahalo~nui~loa
kiitos bedankt ευχαριστίες takk diolch salamat
merci danke~schön arigato tack~så~mycket muchas~gracias
спасибо dziękuję obrigado grazie toda~raba mahalo~nui~loa
kiitos bedankt ευχαριστίες takk diolch salamat
merci danke~schön arigato tack~så~mycket muchas~gracias
спасибо dziękuję obrigado grazie toda~raba mahalo~nui~loa
kiitos bedankt ευχαριστίες takk diolch salamat
thanks:200:@0:#ff0000
The tilde (~) characters keeps associated words together and the text in red is the RGB code to make the word "thanks" appear in red!  The 200 forces "thanks" to be the biggest word and the @0 apparently forces it to be horizontal (though I'm not convinced)!

All settings are the defaults apart from:
Respins:
Theme = Shades of Grey
Font = Euphorogenic
Orientation = H/V
Options:
Shape = Heart (the 5th variation - above the 2nd horse!)
Word: (I wanted some repetition of words other than thanks)
          Remove Common Words = No
          Combine Related Words = No
          Combine Identical Words = No
Layout:
          Max Word Count = 50 (stops the words getting unreadably small)
          Normalize Frequency = Yes (smooths out the variation in word frequencies between 3 & 200)
          Hard Boundary = Yes (makes the shape seem more defined)
Hopefully these settings will help you get started - you can keep altering options until you see something you like and the History Option is worth looking at if you preferred an earlier version - just click on it to reload it.  Have fun and THANK YOU for stopping by!

11 comments:

martina's kaartjes said...

wow ! this is fun ! great idea, thanks for sharing ! have to try it !
greetings, martina
x

JulieJ said...

Wonder if I can get DD to do this. it's a real struggle to write thank-you cards. But she did say she was going to send one to Santa - bless!

scrappyjacky said...

The card looks great.

Rona said...

Very cool! I've been using Wordle, but this looks like it is much more flexible.

Ali said...

The cards all look lovely and thanks for the link to Tagxedo, it looks great.

Lisa said...

gorgeous and so important to remember to send out thank you notes - was only thinking today! I may well follow up on your tagxedo - I love it!

Sian said...

A perfect plan for a thank you card! We have been sitting down to write a few here too - fewer moans now they are a bit older and accept the inevitable!

alexa said...

How lovely of you to make it easy for us! And thank-YOU for all the lovely inspiration and posts this year ..

Missus Wookie said...

Gorgeous! So clever and what a neat idea for a card. These days almost all of ours are email.

Jenny @ I-dream-in-paper.blogspot.co.uk said...

I have just discovered Tagxedo & have found your post invaluable. Thank you so much for sharing what it must have taken you quite some time to acquire. Jenny

Unknown said...

This is great. I've had a go tonight but can't get my thanks to change red. It won't let me change colour of font when I'm loading the words. Do you have any suggestions?