I've used a lot of word clouds recently. But I think of them as charts really, since they are still pretty faithful to the underlying data. The size of the word is proportional to the number of times that word is in the data set. Simple.

But reading a cool data visualization book I came across this. Really it not based on 'data', but it's interesting his words and their location on the page conveys such a lot of information. Perhaps some good, well placed words can replace the need to chart actual data?

http://creativeroots.org/2011/03/italy-infographic-map/