Microsoft Fine Artist

~ the obituary ~

fine artist sat on a north american family-pc shelf in 1994 and i was ten years old in ankara that year with no home computer in the apartment. the typewriter under the bookshelf was the closest thing to a productivity surface in the house. for whatever reason microsoft kids never reached the turkish bilgisayar aisle at any visible run. the first time i saw a copy of fine artist was probably an emulated cd-rom on internet archive in the late 2010s. the original cardboard box was a north-american-toys-r-us object.

what the product was at the layer the user saw: a raster graphics program for children that shipped on cd-rom and floppy in 1994, announced by microsoft on december 7 1993 alongside its sister word processor creative writer. the interface lived inside imaginopolis, a multi-floor cartoon building with a different art tool on each floor. the host was mczee, a blue-skinned purple-haired cartoon character who narrated the toolbars in a synthesized voice. michael shapiro did the voice work, sharing the booth with the same character's appearance in microsoft bob from earlier that year.

fine artist did more than microsoft paint of the same era. the clipart library was bigger and the pieces were manipulable with rotation and resize. the brush palette included splatter and stamp tools designed for a child's idea of a painting rather than an adult's idea of an icon. you could attach a sound effect to a stamp so that placing a sticker triggered a small cartoon noise. the file format was proprietary, named.max in line with creative writer, which meant nothing else ever opened a fine artist file in another decade.

~ the case file ~

~ where it sat in the catalog ~

microsoft home was the consumer-software label microsoft built in 1993 to compete with broderbund and the learning company in the family-pc aisle. microsoft kids sat inside microsoft home as the children's productivity sub-line. fine artist and creative writer were the original two microsoft kids productivity boxes, both designed around the imaginopolis setting and the mczee host. encarta and bookshelf lived in microsoft home on the reference side. 3d movie maker followed in 1995. mczee was the recurring cartoon host across most of the kids line during the 1994 to 1996 window.

the design pitch was the same one microsoft bob tried to sell to adults the same year. a children's software product did not need to look like a tool, it could look like a place. fine artist took the bet that a child opening a paint program wanted to walk into a room with a cartoon helper instead of confronting a blank canvas with a toolbar. in those days the bet read as friendly and slightly patronizing depending on which trade-press reviewer you read. by the time the second wave of microsoft home products reached retail, kid pix and the magic school bus cd-roms had already pulled the same audience toward broderbund.

~ what got buried with it ~

the.max format died with the product. no later paint program opened it natively, so any cartoon a north american child saved in fine artist became unrecoverable as soon as the household stopped maintaining a windows 3.1 machine. the mczee character followed creative writer and fine artist into the basement room where microsoft kept its retired cartoon hosts next to clippy and bob. comic sans, which the microsoft kids label used heavily for friendlier text, made the jump out into windows 95 plus and lived on every birthday card on the internet for the next three decades.

fine artist itself never got a version 2. microsoft kids reorganized through 1996 as the consumer microsoft home label was wound down and the team folded into other divisions. the box stayed in north american retail clearance bins through 1997 and then disappeared. the cd-roms now circulate on internet archive as nostalgia objects for adults who used the product as eight-year-olds. nothing ever replaced it inside the microsoft catalog, since the office paint shop and later the windows accessory tools were aimed at adults rather than children.

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