I like this post on R bloggers proposing several alternatives to word clouds. I’ll list them below but really, you should look at the pictures because hey, this is about pictures.
- circle packing (basically this replaces the words with circles, dealing with the problem of bigger/longer words appearing to be more important in standard word clouds); there is a variation on this called the “horn of plenty” where the circles are arranged in order rather than randomly
- cartogram (in my ignorance, I have been calling this a “bubble map”. I have used these frequently to show engineering model results and find they work well for many people)
- chloropleth (these shade in geographic areas to convey data. I find these work well if the size of the geographic area is important information. If it is not, these tend to draw the viewer’s eye to larger areas, and in that case the bubbles are better. For example, per-person income of Luxembourg vs. China.)
- treemap (I’ve been calling these “packed rectangles” and I generally find them good for anything where conveying relative magnitudes of things to people is important)
- donuts (surpringly, the author concludes a donut is the best option for the data he is trying to show and I kind of agree, it gets the point across and leaves lots of room for labels)
The article has links to the specific packages and code used to create the graphics.