For my information visualization, I decided to visualize text structure of fortune cookie messages in a manner of text clouds.

My purpose of the project was to create an interactive interface where people can see the texts used in fortune cookie messages and where people can look for a message that contains a certain word. In addition, my ultimate goal was to translate “information” into an “artwork.”

I have collected data from web, friends, and local Chinese restaurants. As a result, I assembled dataset of approximately 4,000 fortune cookie messages. With this list, I tried to visualize 50 the most common words used in the messages like a text-cloud.

For the design, I wanted the information of text-cloud of fortune cookie messages to action and look like a real “cloud” in an abstract manner. Therefore, I animated the texts to float over as if clouds float in sky. In order to represent background as sky, I filled the background with color blue.

Here is my initial sketch