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.)
Very nice! Would you consider making it open source and sharing it on GitHub? I’d love to be able to easily install it locally on my machine and also to reuse the retro look of it for my own other local tools.
While I totally get why you say AI can make it for you based on the site in this case, I sense we slowly but surely are moving from "code is the foundation" to "who cares about the code, AI can rewrite it anyway", as if AI in the future will be the only source of truth and you just don't have to worry to know things
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.
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).
(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.)
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
This app even can do proper hard shadows in vector format no less. Something Adobe Illustrator has failed to do (without bending over backwards) for thirtynine years!This will actually be useful to me!
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!
For me it was "Print shop pro" - the 20 minutes of buzzing from the dot matrix to end up with a blocky birthday card to fold in half. Indistinguishable from a bought one!
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").
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)
I recall decades ago when i had first learned what "mail merge" meant, and was amazed by it. But even more so, I began to truly understand the immense value that computing could bring to people. Wow, thanks for this nice trip down nostalgia lane! :-)
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.
This is great. I used to mess around with WordArt a lot when I was younger and this brought that back. Nice that you can get that look without turning the text into an image.
Reminds me of RuneScape you could add colors and wiggles to your text as you spoke. (You could do something similar in MSN, too, change the font and color!)
Whenever someone complains about AI-generated images being everywhere, I try to remind people about WordArt and cliparts (especially the lightbulbs and the ones called "screen beans", never knew that name, thanks Claude for finding that particular tidbit) being absolutely everywhere back then. I consider our timeline vastly superior, but I understand how people may think differently and how anything from thirty years ago can invoke nostalgia, for better or for worse.
I think about this sometimes. In the golden age of the clipart, every utility pole had some. Lost dogs, yard sales, babysitting services. You name it. If the complaint with AI is that it requires little effort or skill to use, and replaces the work of an artist, why was there no pushback against clipart?
There has been a lot of pushback from the professionals, just like typesetters were horrified by all the word processing normal people have done over decades. The correct question is rather, will we have the same sort of nostalgia five years down the road and I think we most certainly will.
I remember a lot of critique of clipart and the general atrocious amateur graphic design of the time (funeral invitations in comic sans and such). Tufte said PowerPoint Is Evil in 2005 and there was a whole public discussion of the ills of the ms office tools and their negative impact on communication.
Thanks for bringing back the school days. Wordart and powerpoint animations were the only things we used to spend time on during computer sessions. BTW is it running on wasm or pure js.