Show HN: TitleArt – Make text like it's 1997

183 points27 comments5 hours ago
davidbarker

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.)

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dstu

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

meerita

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!

mixdup

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

matsemann

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)

muglug

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.

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morikyouko

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.

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swiftcoder

I do indeed feel the nostalgia

bozdemir

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

halflife

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

symbolhunter

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

jeremycarter

I used to use Xara 3D

eis3nheim

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

windows2020

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

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MrFiskarBengt

Nobody asked for this!

florianschauera

test

ReplyIntelligen

haha thats a blast from the past !

sairajb2249

Absolutely love this, like its smooth!