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Commentary

The Visual Thesaurus

Nic Mulvaney on March 13, 2004

I’ve recently become addicted to The Visual Thesaurus. It’s easy to use, good fun, and a great tool for branding or naming ideas.

An experiment in language and interface, Plumb Design’s Visual Thesaurus is both an artistic exploration and a tool to explore, study, and analyze the structure of language. By displaying the interrelationships between words and meanings as spatial maps, the Visual Thesaurus translates language into a visible architecture.

Try the Online Edition. (Click on LOOK IT UP to launch the thesaurus window.)

3 Comments

  1. Dylan Menges says:
    03.14.04 at 3:58 am

    Interesting! Did you buy the app’, Nic? If so, what’s the advantage?

    Thanks for the heads up!

  2. Nic Mulvaney says:
    03.14.04 at 4:54 am

    I just use the online edition at the moment. I think the main benefits (as I gather from the FAQ) are High-resolution printing, copy & paste, no internet connection (must be faster) and the option to add/subtract words of your own like a personal dictionary. It’s very cheap aswell. I think I will buy it in the near future, but its so easy just to launch the website.

  3. Scott Nazarian says:
    03.14.04 at 11:04 pm

    Another beautiful example in the hyperbolic metaphor is ‘valence’, by Benjamin Fry, a graduate of MIT Media Lab. He and Casey Reas wrote the software ‘Processing’ which makes this possible.

    See the project description here

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