Animated text sphere in JavaScript using TagCloud.js

I needed a sphere of rotating words for one of my projects. So, I scoured the internet for that. Hard luck didn't find anything suitable. I did find one pen on codepen which had a very complicated JavaScript code, difficult to understand. That is when I came across TagCloud.js by Cong Min. Check out his GitHub profile.

TagCloud.js is a standalone JavaScript library for rendering an animated, interactive, 3D sphere tag cloud from an array text strings you provide.

Read the documentation here.

Now, how to create one on your own:

HTML

1. Create a container to hold the tag cloud.

<span class="content"></span>

1. Import the TagCloud.js script CDN in the document

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/TagCloud@2.2.0/dist/TagCloud.min.js"></script>

CSS

1. Add your own CSS styles to the tag cloud.

.tagcloud {
    font-family: 'Poppins', sans-serif;  
    font-size: 20px;
    font-weight: 650;
    margin-left: 30%;
  }
  .tagcloud--item:hover {
    color: #36454F;
  }

JavaScript

1. Define your tags in a JS array.

const myTags = [
    'JavaScript', 'CSS', 'HTML',
    'C', 'C++', 'React',
    'Python', 'Java', 'git',
    'django', 'Node.js', 'OpenCV',
    'GCP', 'MySQL', 'jQuery',
];

1. Render a default tag cloud.

var tagCloud = TagCloud('.content', myTags);

1. Config the tag cloud by overriding the default parameters

var tagCloud = TagCloud('.content', myTags,{

  // radius in px
  radius: 300,

  // animation speed
  // slow, normal, fast
  maxSpeed: 'fast',
  initSpeed: 'fast',

  // 0 = top
  // 90 = left
  // 135 = right-bottom
  direction: 135,

  // interact with cursor move on mouse out
  keep: true

});

This creates a basic cloud of words. If you want to change the color of words randomly after each reload, add this small JavaScript code at the end.

var colors = ['#34A853', '#FBBC05', '#4285F4', '#7FBC00', 'FFBA01', '01A6F0'];
var random_color = colors[Math.floor(Math.random() * colors.length)];
document.querySelector('.content').style.color = random_color;

If done correctly, you should get this result 👇

And that's it, very simple and straightforward😉✌ Thanks for reading!!