davidbarker 5 hours ago

I wanted to make a faithful recreation of the original WordArt so I went through the various screenshots I could find and tweaked the built-in styles by eye. It's pretty fun to play with, and I didn't realise it would take me back to sitting in the ICT computer rooms at my school in the late '90s.

Enjoy!

And please feel free to share anything you make with me — I'd love to see. (Contact details in the help menu.)

  • poglet 5 hours ago

    Brought back many memories. There were also some fonts that added 'shimmer' and 'sparkle' text. You didn't run up a Win98 VM and install the old Word? Great job at making it all by screenshots and eye.

    • davidbarker 4 hours ago

      Wonderful.

      I never thought of that, actually. Perhaps I should as I don't remember shimmer or sparkle. I'll see if I can find some examples (if you happen to know of any I can reference please send them over).

      • akx 3 hours ago

        Here -- they were effects you could add on regular text:

        https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RHbP2Q7A-Wg

        (I still find it mind-boggling that Word 2000 runs mostly just fine on a MacBook with an entirely different OS and processor architecture via Whisky/Wine.)

  • pjmlp 59 minutes ago

    Thanks, but if fails short without a dot matrix printer to go alongside it, to print out those hanging banners. :)

  • kleiba2 57 minutes ago

    Wow, that landing page was instant nostalgia for me. Well done!

dstu 40 minutes ago

Oh this takes me back, what a cool project. Can someone reinvent the internet from that era next please?

mixdup 4 hours ago

One of the weirdest bits of 90s tech trivia: Scott Forstall, who was in charge of software at Apple when the iPhone was initially developed, when working as an Intern at Microsoft contributed to the development of WordArt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Forstall#Present

meerita 55 minutes ago

Who else remembers using BannerMania and printing those endless banners on Epson dot-matrix printers with continuous paper? Man, those were the days! What a nostalgia trip!

muglug 5 hours ago

I had some fun adding WordArt support to Slack's Word document renderer.

Turns out that WordArt is still feasible in modern-day Word, but it's really fiddly.

  • davidbarker 4 hours ago

    Do you have any notes/write-up on that? I'd love to read.

    • tim-- 3 hours ago

      You need to open up a document in Compatibility Mode on a Windows machine. Basically, open an older .doc file (save a blank new document in Word, as a Word 2000 file). You will see it in the "Insert" tab on the ribbon (it's the "A" next to "text box").

chamomeal 30 minutes ago

Absolute legend, I’m going to slap these all over my site

matsemann 2 hours ago

At around 10 years old, I remember spending more time on the word art for my titles than the rest of the paper for school projects, heh.

Also remember that I set up some kind of templating, where I could print the same document multiple times, but it would go down a list of values. So I could print personalized birthday invitations, I felt so cool 8)

morikyouko 2 hours ago

Is there any plans to support CJK fonts or to release the source code so others can contribute? I'm so disappointed it doesn't support my language! https://www.makewordart.com/ supports a wider character set but is no where near as good otherwise.

  • davidbarker 50 minutes ago

    I've just added support and it seems to work in the testing I've done. If you find anything that's off, feel free to let me know. Have fun!

bozdemir 2 hours ago

I miss 90s CorelDRAW, it reminds me of that. Thanks for the nostalgia fill.

halflife 3 hours ago

I remember having Word 5 installed on my pc, while the other classmates had Word 97. I was so jealous for their wordart!

symbolhunter 3 hours ago

Man, this takes me back! The internet felt like a different place back then.

eis3nheim 3 hours ago

This just bought back memories, I used to play with it for hours when I was a kid.

swiftcoder 58 minutes ago

I do indeed feel the nostalgia

windows2020 4 hours ago

I've always been fond of the red blue gradient one which I imagine to be an Arizona desert.

sairajb2249 3 hours ago

Absolutely love this, like its smooth!