Mind Toys – Sites that draw you to play!

The internet has exploded … literally! There are virtually hundreds and thousands of interesting website links being posted on blogs, social bookmarking and networking sites. Most of the time you’ll be lucky if you can barely browse something and remember it before something snazzier catches your eye or you are caught up in the latest craze of the day. As designers and programmers, there are specific kinds of websites and posts that get our shorts tied up in a bunch. Freebies would be one :-). Stuff that makes you look clever is another. And finally something that draws you to play, instead of just watching and reading and browsing. There are indeed some interesting sites that generate an itch, to try out something fun and to play. These are some of those websites …

 

Wordle.net

Create Tag Clouds for a website or a design or just for fun. It is also interesting to see what people create and what goes on in their minds when they are keying in words for the tag cloud.

 

Newspaper Clipping Generator

Create Your Own Newspaper Clipping

This is really really fun. I used it for a Christmas Flash E-card last year. And I just generated my very own piece of fantasy .. well sci-fi fantasy. Go ahead, become a celebrity and have your name pop up on the headlines of a major newspaper. You know you always dreamt of it!

 

Visual Thesaurus

This is a brilliant concept. A visual play on words. I could spend hours on this website. It is essentially Pandora’s box. You dont know what’s coming next and where it is leading you. The free version only allows you a limited number of searches.

 

Kuler

Adobe’s pet project for the visual addiction of coloured minds. It is a funky website and a revolutionary concept. You can browse hundreds of color swatches, modify them, bookmark them, download them for use in your design softwares, create new ones and a cartload of other community activities prevalent in social sites like these. The Most Popular & Highest Rated Swatches will immediately shout out the current colour trends in the market and the crazy, creative names people think up for the colour schemes are another plus to browse the website.