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.
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.)
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!
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
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.
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)
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.
Enjoy!
And please feel free to share anything you make with me — I'd love to see. (Contact details in the help menu.)
Also, the Web is already open source
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).
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.)
Same reason it was popular, then overused, the first time. It'll happen to you!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DlTexEXxLQ
Turns out that WordArt is still feasible in modern-day Word, but it's really fiddly.
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)
https://protoweb.org/
Also, any plans to add more font support to this?
C:>