Mono-spaced type has been all but removed from places on the internet, so it’s no surprise larger scale ASCII art isn’t common anymore. But have any of you made such stuff way back when, or perhaps more recently for nostalgic fun?
I made this at the end of 2022 when I realized Notepad++ was mono-spaced by default, and wanted to try creating my sona. Text is an interesting medium to work with, it reminds me of pixel art in a way due to the constraints. That and for the first time in my life I found a use for the insert key, absolutely amazing.
Never personally, but I have to say, it’s one of the things I miss from late 90’s/early 00’s internet. Heading over to GameFAQs (set as my homepage, of course) and looking up my favorite game to see some lovingly crafted ASCII fanart as the header. That’s how you knew the guide was going to be good.
Yeah that’d be a good way to immediately know the guide was going to be a labor of love. I remember a little of site art, though my biggest exposure was surely sailing the high seas as a kid since I had no way to buy anything. The art was always so cool, I wish things didn’t make it break virtually everywhere.
The only one I ever made was boobs/eyes with a Y.
( . Y . )Everyone else at the time was doing (.)(.) and it looked nothing like boobs.
Oh yeah I do remember seeing that a lot back then, the Y addition makes a lot more sense. A very good choice!
There used to be programs that would help you create ASCII art. I remember playing with those.
If you saved anything from then, I’d like to see it! Hadn’t really thought about special tools for it, but it does make sense.
Six grade was when we learned to type in my school district. We didn’t learn on computers though, but old typewriters. I remember if we got done with our lesson that day the teacher had these ASCII art sheets where you create art by typing. Each sheet had instructions on which keys to press and how many times.
I know it was tricking us to learn the keyboard and where keys were, but I really enjoyed making the typewriter art.
Making art with typewriters sounds really interesting! I’ve never heard of special instruction sheets like that before, and my searching just let me to a bunch of typewriter stock photos lol. Perhaps there’s a specific name that’d make it show up, but either way I’m glad you were able to experience that!
Not exactly the ones I was given but I did a search and found an example of one. On this pdf look at page 13 at Typewriter Mystery. It was similar to that where it told you what to hit and in what order.
http://www.aquaporin4.com/etcetera/ETC.06.pdf
And yeah the problem with these typewriter art instructions they don’t work on computer text as well, so a lot of these typewriter art instructions were left as paper versions instead of digital.
Thank you for this pdf, now I entirely understand! Here is the result from this mystery, which I curiously typed out to see what would come of it. Initially I thought it was a house with a large chimney, bellowing smoke in a few directions, but apparently it’s a Dutch windmill! After hearing the answer in the following issue I could see the fan blades and the size made a lot more sense lol.
@Foxfire ASCII art is alive and well in source code. Here’s some I created recently.
