raisedinruins:

usatoday:

Big speeches mean it’s word cloud time. Here are visualizations of Mitt Romney’s (top) and Barack Obama’s (below) prepared speeches at the two conventions.  

What’s your takeaway?

while I’m no fan of Romney the color choices for your fonts give away who you’re in favor of. You’ve chosen blacks and reds and oranges, the colors most minds immediately think of danger while for obama he get neutral blues and greens which naturally relax the mind. other than that, yeah romney uses a lot of the same words. but if you’re going to attempt something like this you should be careful of your bias

Good comment — thank you. I actually spent a good bit of time thinking about this, starting with the idea to use all red words for Romney and blue for Obama, as our friends at the Detroit Free Press did with platform-based word clouds the other day. (I also liked how they laid them side by side, vertically, instead of horizontally, but horizontal looked better for the speech text. So I decided to put Romney atop since his speech was first.)

In Wordle.net, which I used to create the clouds, my palette options were limited. Using a solid color didn’t get across the diversity of the words, and so I tried to choose a red-based palette for Romney and a blue-based one for Obama, but there are only a handful of pre-designed palettes, and I wanted both to have a white background, which limits the options further. You can build your own palette, but I opted not to in order to get this out sooner.

Hope that makes sense. Thanks again. 

-Mary Hartney Nahorniak, USA TODAY social media editor