ASCII Art

About

ASCII Art is a way of drawing or composing an image through using symbols, letters, or numbers of the ASCII font code. They are usually very complex and take a big part of the screen or space they are located.

Origin

The exact origin of this art is hard to trace as it’s use has been tracked all the way back to 1966 when Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon published “Studies in Perception I” which featured some of their art. ^[1]

Spread

Originally the concept was to create pictures on computer screens back before they were able to produce images other than basic characters. The technique was also used to print images in some of the first printers. The art can range from very basic shapes or characters to huge, complicated images. Small ones are usually manually made. On the other side, huge ones are most commonly made with image altering software in which the user inputs a real image, and then the software converts the image into a ASCII symbol composed text-image. They are usually found in comments, forum posts, signature, and many other fields which are writable. Even spambots make use of ascii art to attract attention to their post.

Triforcing is a common posting on 4chan that uses ascii characters to create the famous triforce symbol from the game The Legend of Zelda.

LulzSec would include their signature ascii Lulz boat designs on their pastebin post and also included one on their homepage. These designs were copied from chris.com’s ascii art section.^[2]

Fail Whale was a popular trend where users of facebook and twitter would post comments of ascii whales on their friend’s statuses.

Examples:

Some web-pages prohibiting the use of multiple consecutive spaces resulting in a flattened and shifted picture. This can also happen when someone post on an image board where the image shifts the first few lines over and then the next lines are shifted under the image.

Sources

^[1] Wikipedia – ASCII Art

^[2] Chris.com – Boat – Submarine – Navy – Sail – Sails – Nautical