Flower Power

A while back I shared Ten Cards on the Tenth and some of my readers admired the flower-powered 21st birthday card (see below) which I'd made with Tagxedo.
In honour of my 200th blog post here are some pointers to help you get started:

First of all the flowers are from Saru's Flower Ding Font available free from dafont here.
You will need to download it to your computer then add it to Tagxedo from the Font menu.
Then you need to choose the flowers you like - by their letter equivalents - and load those letters into Tagxedo.  Don't worry if nothing shows up yet there are a few settings that need tweaking.

I loaded the following letters corresponding to flower shapes I liked:

A B C D G H I L M O V W X o p x y

I repeated them a few times each and added a heart character as well:

♥:50:@0
A A A B B B B B B B B B B C C C C D D D D D
G G G G G G G G H H H H H H H H H I I I I I I I I L L L L L L L L
M M M M M O O O O O O O O O O V V V V V V V V V V V V V W W W W W W
X X X X X X X X o o o o o o o p p p p p x x x x x x x x x y y y y y y

The 50 forces the ♥ to be the most frequent character and the @0 forces it to be horizontal.

I chose a number as my Tagxedo shape in the ChunkFive font (a nice thick shape to fill with flowers).  There's a new option on Tagxedo to invert the shapes now so I inverted one of the zeros for a different look.

All settings are the defaults apart from:

Respins:
Theme = Limeade On Ice / Tibetan Monk / Shades Of Red
Font = Saru's Flower Ding (must be added to the available fonts before you can select it)
Orientation = Any
Options:
Shape = 2 / 0 inverted / 0
Word:
          Punctuations = Yes (this allows the ♥ to show)
          Remove Common Words = No
          Combine Related Words = No
          Combine Identical Words = No
Layout:
          Max Word Count = 150 (stops the flowers getting too small - for printing out reduce it further)
          Normalize Frequency = Yes (smooths out the variation in word frequencies between 3 & 50)
          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.
Of course, my colour themes have a black background for a snazzy blog post - for printing on card you need to choose one with a white background to save on ink!

My 21st card uses the Happy Brights colour theme