Hacker News

Show HN: TitleArt – Make text like it's 1997(titleart.dvy.io)

405 points by davidbarker 4 days ago | 82 comments

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.)

[–] pjmlp 3 days ago

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

[–] nether1 2 days ago

Good old dot matrix. That dot matrix print noise is etched in my brain forever

[–] poglet 4 days 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 4 days 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 4 days 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 days ago

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

[–] QuantumNomad_ 3 days 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.

[–] EGreg 3 days ago

What if you ask your AI to make it for you based on the site?

Also, the Web is already open source

[–] az09mugen 3 days ago

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

[–] QuantumNomad_ 3 days ago

The web is source available, and only partly. When I say open source I mean a permissive license like MIT, ISC, etc.

[–] logicallee 3 days ago

>Also, the Web is already open source

Maybe. What does the license/signed contract if you have one say?

[–] segmondy 3 days ago

This is pretty awesome! Thanks for sharing. I was playing with it and had to stop! Brings back lots of good memories.

[–] hotelsacher 3 days ago

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

[–] brynnb 3 days ago

You can by attempting one or two of the actions on my site :)

https://brynnbateman.com/

[–] kleiba2 3 days ago

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

[–] mixdup 4 days 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

[–] Tommix11 3 days 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!

[–] muglug 4 days 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 4 days ago

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

[–] tim-- 4 days 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").

[–] meerita 3 days 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 3 days 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!

[–] aembleton 3 days ago

I think there was something on Acorn computers that did that. Maybe it was in its word processor.

[–] matsemann 3 days 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 3 days ago

"mail merge"!

[–] mxuribe 3 days ago

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! :-)

[–] halflife 4 days ago

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

[–] dstu 3 days ago

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

[–] solyin 3 days ago

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

[–] dstu 3 days ago

I’ll even sign your guestbook.

[–] aembleton 3 days ago

I hope you have a good animated 'under construction' gif

[–] petepete 3 days ago

Protoweb might be of interest to you.

https://protoweb.org/

[–] morikyouko 4 days 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.

[–] davidbarker 3 days 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!

[–] z3t4 3 days ago

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

[–] aembleton 3 days ago

This is so much more fun than AI. I love playing around with it

[–] schiffern 3 days ago

Brain rewards new thing over familiar stimulus. More at 11

Same reason it was popular, then overused, the first time. It'll happen to you!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DlTexEXxLQ

[–] andai 3 days ago

Oh my god, this is delightful.

It even does lets you animate them!

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!)

[–] marcellosso 3 days ago

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.

[–] eternityforest 2 days ago

I really like how it can do animation and embed images, so you can make 88x31 badges!

[–] pronik 3 days ago

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.

[–] 5040 3 days ago

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?

[–] pronik 3 days ago

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.

[–] tokai 3 days ago

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.

[–] amanzi 3 days ago

This brings back memories! My first personal website used that orange gradient with the 3D text for the logo (my name).

[–] pkb_98 3 days 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?

[–] MollyRealized 2 days ago

TheDraw - Make text like it's 1980s [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw

[–] windows2020 4 days ago

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

[–] davidbarker 4 days ago

Username checks out.

[–] eis3nheim 4 days ago

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

[–] wemakethings 3 days ago

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

[–] hkudale 3 days ago

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.

[–] bozdemir 3 days ago

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

[–] davidbarker 3 days ago

I immediately think of the hot air balloon.

[–] symbolhunter 4 days ago

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

[–] MitPitt 3 days ago

This could be genuinely useful for web design because it's easy to setup layout reflow using all the sliders. I hope you'll open source it.

[–] omoikane 3 days ago

Current UI text looks blurry in Chrome and Firefox, probably because it's using a font that's optimized for 11px but font-size is scaled to 13.75px.

[–] chester_r 3 days ago

Any plans for a WordArt MCP or CLI? I'd use it liberally for every AI-generated slide deck I generate. (only half-joking)