Tag Bars are the new Tag Clouds

By now you are probably familiar with Tag Clouds as used by Flickr and del.icio.us. Also known as “weighted lists” they are a visual depiction of the content tags used in a website.

Existing tag cloud designs are great interfaces but they aren’t perfect. Firstly they don’t compensate for word lengths – for instance “extreme sports” maybe as popular as “pets” but it will be extreme sports that will get your attention. Secondly all those different type sizes always appear a little messy, although as tag clouds become ubiquitous they will inevitably become part of the visual vernacular of the web.

We think existing tag clouds could be improved and with this in mind we have developed Tag Bars, which replaces words with coloured blocks. Although the words aren’t revealed until rolling over them (a crime punishable by death in certain user-interface circles) we think it’s far more aesthetically pleasing and much fairer on the little words, like – pets. Aaaah.