Generate Modern Stylish Wordcloud with stylecloud

Almost every Text Analytics Project with a need to find insights from Text Corpus would contain a word cloud. But as many of you remember, Wordclouds have got a very boring image and perception in the minds of a data scientist that we always try to beautify them — ultimately giving up in the process — except a few would choose some masking image and then try to get the wordcloud in that shape. That’s the maximum level where most of us would take our wordclouds.

But deep down, all of us have always wished for modern-stylish-beautiful wordclouds. That wish has become true with this new python package — stylecloud by Max Woolf (who’s famously known as minimaxir)

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About styelcloud

stylecloud is a Python package that leverages the popular word_cloud package, adding useful features to create truly unique word clouds that are stylistic including gradients and icon shapes.

stylecloud installation

stylecloud is just one pip away

pip3 install stylecloud

stylecloud — Basics

stylecloud offers two ways to generate a style-wordcloud:

• stylecloud as a CLI command that could be invoked from your Terminal/Shell/Cmd Prompt to generate wordcloud (fast and stylish)
• Typical pythonic way of importing the stylecloud package and creating the wordcloud using stylecloud() in the code

Sample Text File

For this article, We’ll consider the iconic inaugural address of former US President Barack Obama in 2008 when he was elected as the POTUS.

Download the file — 2009–01–20-inaugural-address.txt— from here

stylecloud — CLI

Simply, open your Terminal or Command Prompt and try this below command stylecloud pointing to the file that we downloaded above

stylecloud --file_path 2009-01-20-inaugural-address.txt

This simple command from stylecloud results in this beautiful plot (automatically saved in the same current directory as stylecloud.png)

That’s simple, fast and beautiful isn’t it? ⚑

stylecloud — in Python Script

stylecloud in CLI is for normal humans, but we are coders who like to code in Python . So let’s build the same in Python with the following 2 lines of code.

import stylecloud
stylecloud.gen_stylecloud(file_path = "2009-01-20-inaugural-address.txt")

stylecloud — Customization

Now, let’s say we don’t want it in the shape of a flag but in the form of twitter logo. After all, this is the age of internet, isn’t it? A little change in the code — just a new argument to give the specific fontawesome icon name would get us the twitter-shaped stylecloud of Mr. Obama’s speech.

stylecloud.gen_stylecloud(file_path = "2009-01-20-inaugural-address.txt", icon_name= "fab fa-twitter")

Now, Let’s change the color palette a bit and also a dark theme (which everyone’s fond of these days)

stylecloud.gen_stylecloud(file_path = "2009-01-20-inaugural-address.txt", icon_name= "fab fa-twitter", palette="cartocolors.diverging.TealRose_7", background_color="black")

That’s real Dark! And if you’re a fan of Linkedin (instead of Twitter), not to leave you behind — here’s your Linkedin Icon-shaped style-wordcloud

Summary

Thanks to Max Woolf , We’re gifted with this amazing library stylecloud. We just quickly learnt how to play with this modern-stylish wordcloud generator both as a CLI tool and in Python script. The PNG files and notebook can be found here.