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

[OP] davidbarker | 8 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 | 8 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.

[OP] davidbarker | 8 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 | 7 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.)

TomGarden | 3 hours ago

Man, whenever I see nostaligic things like this I remember how instantly responsive computers used to feel. Good times.

pjmlp | 4 hours ago

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

kleiba2 | 4 hours ago

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

hotelsacher | 3 hours ago

I feel like I should be able to crash the Windows behind this page by triggering some bug in the app.

QuantumNomad_ | 2 hours ago

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.

muglug | 8 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.

[OP] davidbarker | 8 hours ago

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

tim-- | 6 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").

windows2020 | 8 hours ago

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

[OP] davidbarker | 8 hours ago

Username checks out.

mixdup | 8 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

eis3nheim | 7 hours ago

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

halflife | 7 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 | 6 hours ago

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

sairajb2249 | 6 hours ago

Absolutely love this, like its smooth!

morikyouko | 6 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.

[OP] davidbarker | 4 hours 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!

ReplyIntelligen | 6 hours ago

haha thats a blast from the past !

bozdemir | 6 hours ago

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

matsemann | 5 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)

flatcakes | an hour ago

"mail merge"!

MrFiskarBengt | 5 hours ago

Nobody asked for this!

jeremycarter | 4 hours ago

I used to use Xara 3D

swiftcoder | 4 hours ago

I do indeed feel the nostalgia

meerita | 4 hours 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!

glinkot | an hour ago

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!

florianschauera | 4 hours ago

test

dstu | 4 hours ago

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

solyin | 3 hours ago

I'd add you to my webring, but it's under construction.

dstu | 3 hours ago

I’ll even sign your guestbook.

petepete | 56 minutes ago

Protoweb might be of interest to you.

https://protoweb.org/

chamomeal | 4 hours ago

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

ceving | 3 hours ago

The scrollbars are not authentic.

OwlsParlay | 3 hours ago

Love this. A great stretch goal would be the Win95 clip-art stick figures. Those are iconic.

pkb_98 | 3 hours ago

This is so nostalgic. The shadow picker used to be half the fun. I spent more time on that than anything.

Also, any plans to add more font support to this?

pentakkusu | 2 hours ago

Now this is well done!

sixeyes | 2 hours ago

wow, thanks! i was JUST thinking about booting up some old VM so that i could play with word art again. yay =^.^=

ctrix | 2 hours ago

it brings me to the old times!

C:>

Tommix11 | 50 minutes ago

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!

wemakethings | 49 minutes ago

Really enjoyed playing around with this. The menus are just so authentic!

z3t4 | 38 minutes ago

I think when people get tired of AI generated invitations they'll go back to this.

z3t4 | 38 minutes ago

Should add an option to export to CSS/SVG