ASCII art
Text-based visual art using ASCII characters.
The term is also loosely used to refer to text-based visual art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor and is often used with free-form languages, requiring a fixed-width font such as Courier or Consolas for presentation.
- field
- Graphic design, computer art
- known_for
- Creating pictures using ASCII characters
Lore & Background
ASCII art was invented, in large part, because early printers often lacked graphics ability and thus, characters were used in place of graphic marks. Also, to mark divisions between different print jobs from different users, bulk printers often used ASCII art to print large banner pages, making the division easier to spot so that the results could be more easily separated by a computer operator or clerk. ASCII art was also used in early e-mail when images could not be embedded.
Reader's Guide
ASCII art's significance lies in its role as a bridge between text and image in early computing, enabling visual communication when graphics capabilities were limited. It was widely used on computer bulletin board systems of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and later in online MUDs, Internet Relay Chat, email, and message boards. Despite a decline during the 1990s with the rise of graphical browsing, ASCII art survived and is still seen today on the CLI app Neofetch, which displays the logo of the OS on which it is invoked. ASCII art is used wherever text can be more readily printed or transmitted than graphics, including typewriters, teleprinters, non-graphic computer terminals, printer separators, early computer networking, email, and Usenet news messages. It also appears in source code for representation of company logos or diagrams, and in electronic schematic archives. Early mainframe games frequently used ASCII art to simulate graphics, notably the roguelike genre. Media players like MPlayer and VLC can display videos as ASCII art through the AAlib library. The legacy of ASCII art includes emoticons, ASCII comics, and the work of prolific artists like Joan Stark, active on Usenet's alt.ascii.art in the mid 1990s.
Did You Know?
- ASCII art was used in early e-mail when images could not be embedded.
- ASCII art is seen to this day on the CLI app Neofetch, which displays the logo of the OS on which it is invoked.
- Joan Stark is an American prolific ASCII artist who was active on Usenet's alt.ascii.art in the mid 1990s.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I display ASCII art so it looks right?
You need a fixed-width (monospaced) font such as Courier or Consolas so every glyph occupies the same horizontal space and the image stays aligned. The artwork itself can be created in any plain text editor, but proper presentation depends on that monospaced rendering.
Why is ASCII art important in design and digital-arts history?
It is one of the earliest forms of computer-generated visual art, tracing back to mid-1960s experiments at Bell Labs. Because it requires nothing more than a text editor and a monospaced font, it made digital image-making accessible long before dedicated graphics software existed.
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