How often have you been putting together a presentation, handout, or promo piece and you wanted a cool graphic? If you are like me, you want a cool graphic, but you don’t always have time to create one, the talent to create one, or the money to pay someone else to create one. So…when I come across a tool that creates cool graphics – and it’s free! – I get pretty excited.

Yesterday I was listening to Matt Guevara (@mattguevara) talk about teaching digital learners. Toward the end, he just listed out a bunch of what he called “random Lego pieces” that anyone could use. Websites. Apps. Books.

Two that were fascinating to me were Wordle and Tagxedo. As you can see from the picture above, they are “wordcloud” creators. You input anything – words, Twitter name, blog article, etc. – and hit “submit.” It is literally that easy. Wordle is the more basic of the two. Less options…but also very clean and very cool. Tagxedo is, as Matt said, “Wordle on steriods". Want to change the shape? No problem. Want to change the color scheme? Got ya covered. Want to get rid of one of the words? Easy as pie. Want to save it, print it, or share it on Facebook/Twitter/etc.? Just a click away.

For the record, the above wordcloud was created using Tagxedo in about three minutes by simply typing in my twitter handle (@keithferrin), selecting a different color scheme, and changing the shape. I could see so many uses for this.

Oh…and did I mention they are both free? Enjoy.

How are you going to use Wordle and Tagxedo? What other free creativity tools have you found?