Embrace the 90s again with Kid Pix’s web app

Remember spending hours on painting softwares as a child, creating haphazard masterpieces on your blocky computer the size of a small car, maybe with Phil Collins playing in the kitchen? If you’re feeling nostalgic for the imagination and creativity of our more innocent times, the iconic 90s art software for children Kid Pix has been adapted for use on the web. First released in 1989 for Macintosh by Craig Hickman, Vikrum Nijjar adapted the software in his “spare time”.

It has all the original tools like paint brushes and kitsch stamps which, with all our sleek and minimalist design preferences today, seem like a breath of fresh air delivered in the form of a blast from the past. The highly pixelated interface aims to encourage its users to embrace the playfulness of a bygone and romanticised era: the 90s.

The software’s retro drawing and painting tools are paired with joyfully exaggerated sound effects. Mind-boggling and verging on difficult to use, with no friendly bots to guide you along the way, it could make someone feel almost resentful of our perfectly pristine contemporary software. Simply experimenting with each tool till you’ve somewhat cracked it, the software helps us use intuition and curiosity instead of being told exactly how to use a software. Embracing our inner child is often a necessary step during any creative process so the Kid Pix adaptation could be seen as a much welcome deliverance. Bring back strawberry stamps!

Before the internet became the somewhat malevolent force it can be made out to be these days, we were simply using it to play games and create really bad digital paintings, all of us self-proclaimed artists and designers probably spending way too much time on our now-ancient machines. Take a trip down memory lane and try the Kid Pix app out here.