I think that ASCII art is a sort of neat side niche of the typographical age. I remember back in 1985, taking a typing class in 7th grade... we learned on manual typewriters with no letters on the keys. There were maybe 20 of them in the classroom. There were also about 3 electric typewriters, which the kids who got to class first would jump to claim. When you were done with your drills out of the book, sometimes the teacher would hand out papers with elaborate ASCII creations on them that we could duplicate "for fun". Looking back it wasn't really all that fun on a manual typewriter, counting out spaces and slashes and underscores, and if you messed up (remember--blank keys) you had a big ugly blemish on your picture (we didn't have white-out in class). Of course, computers have made it all so much easier...
ASCII art comes in many forms, from very simple pictoral representations such as:
@ V | | | | | | | \_/ _||_ |
<^ . .^> |
...to decorative flourishes such as this little guy:
·······÷••••
Or more complex drawings like this:
\`"-.
) _`-.
, : `. \
: _ ' \
; *` _. `--._
`-.-' `-.
| ` `.
:. . \
| \ . | .-' .
: )-.\ / / :
: ; | : : ;-.
; / : |\_: _ `- )
,-' / ,-' ; .-`- .' `--'
"--' "---' "---' |
And of course smileys and emoticons :) O.o
Here is a nifty ASCII art generator that will make ASCII art text for you in a variety of fonts.
And then there is the sort of "fake" ASCII art which uses characters as pixels, either colorized or black and white. These are usually generated with a program such as MosASCII.
Full page, fancy-pants ASCII stuff (a lot of the black and white ones look stretched out vertically):
- Tiger (all 1's and 0's, in color)
- Baby Tiger (all 1's and 0's, in color)
- Dennis Quaid (random characters, black on white)
- Kitten (random characters, black on white)
- My son, Dominic (all 1's and 0's, in color)
- Puppy (random characters, black on white)
- Purple Flower (all 1's and 0's, in color)
- Ship | Ship (small) (black characters on white)
— 12:21:09 PM
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