WordArt
Thirty preset styles, one rainbow gradient, and a generation of book reports that opened with their titles bent into impossible arches. WordArt was Microsoft's gift to the school computer lab — where personality went to become garish, and unstoppable.
WordArt was created in 1991 by two Microsoft interns, Nat Brown and Scott Forstall — both of whom would later become Apple employees. It arrived as a text-styling feature in Microsoft Word, offering thirty preset styles: rainbow gradients, chrome effects, drop shadows, 3-D extrusions — a weapon of graphic design handed to people who had never been trusted with one before.
The ritual was nearly universal. Every book report, every science-fair poster, every family-reunion flyer that emerged from a school computer lab opened with its title in WordArt, and the style you picked was personality. It lived alongside clip art as the entire graphic-design toolkit available to a kid with a deadline — text that could be bent, arched, chrome-plated, and somehow improved by being so aggressively unsubtle that it became its own kind of beauty.
Office 2007 overhauled WordArt in Excel and PowerPoint with new, tastefully flat styles; Word kept the classic gallery until new presets arrived with Word 2010 — and the rainbow-arch era quietly ended. But in a thousand family filing cabinets, book reports still sit with their titles bent forever into an impossible arch.
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