davidbarker 2 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 2 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 2 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 an hour 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.)

muglug 2 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 2 hours ago

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

    • tim-- 21 minutes 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").

mixdup 2 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

symbolhunter 17 minutes ago

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

halflife 30 minutes ago

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

eis3nheim an hour ago

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

sairajb2249 13 minutes ago

Absolutely love this, like its smooth!

windows2020 2 hours ago

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