Rahul Raikar

Tagging is the process of labeling data with related keywords. The basic idea of tag clouds is to represent tags according to their meaning, their weight and their frequency relatively to other tags. This is done with appropriate font sizes and colors. The more important a tag is, the bigger and louder it appears (or at least should appear). Tag clouds are often considered as one of the typical design elements in Web 2.0. However it’s possible that the concept is recently loosing its popularity. Over the last years many sites used the technique, because they wanted to look “smashy”, although they really weren’t. This resulted in unusable and boring designs, supported by the quick’n’dirty-tagging.
Tag clouds offer a quite interesting approach for site navigation; although the technique is sometimes considered to be an “alternative”, it shouldn’t replace the “common” navigation but support it giving users additional clues about the content of the site. Due to their “cloudy” form the design of tag clouds sets them apart from other design elements on a page. And although designers don’t really have that much choice in designing them, they still find their ways to break through the bounds of creativity and come up with some unusual approaches and solutions.