What is ASCII Art?
http://live.pirillo.com/ – I remember my first experience with ASCII art: it was a simple smiley face ":)" and I had no idea what it is: after asking what it was someone told me to turn my head to the side. Lo and behold, it was a small smiley face.
The smiley face is a really small form of ASCII art, and years ago it was a skill practiced by many people: the skill of taking fixed-width characers and making an image from it.
Nowadays ASCII art is almost a lost art. Not nearly as many people practice it today as they used to, but Chris (no, not Chris Pirillo) still practices. He was one of the first people involved with the ASCII art "movement" – he still provides ASCII art and continues to create more ASCII artwork.
If you’re not particularly artistic you can download Jave, which will create ASCII art that you can create in a text file.
The key to ASCII art is to use a fixed-width font: every character takes up as much space as every other character – a period takes up as much space as Q, and so on.
Fhoto2Text allows you to upload an image which will convert it to ASCII art.
Do you like ASCII art? Do you have any ASCII art you want to share?
Want to embed our What is ASCII Art? video in your blog? Use this code:
Formats available: MPEG4 Video (.mp4), Flash Video (.flv), MP3 Audio (.mp3), Microsoft Video (.avi)
Private Domain Registration from GoDaddy is a smart thing to do. When you register a domain, your contact information is immediately made available to anyone who wants to see it. Plus, as a listener of The Chris Pirillo Show, enter code CHRIS2 when you check out, and save an additional $5 off any order of $30 or more. Get your piece of the internet at GoDaddy!
3 Comments
Maria
July 24th, 2007
at 9:43am
My first ASCII Art experience was pornographic ASCII art animations on an Apple //e. I guess that shows two things:
(1) I’ve been around a while.
(2) I had weird friends in college.
Tom
July 26th, 2007
at 8:16am
ASCII art pornography? I cannot imagine ASCII art portography, but I will admit to some curiousity.
Nick
July 26th, 2007
at 3:17pm
I’ve also been around a while and remember an excellent, oversize ASCII rendition of the Mona Lisa being printed on an IBM360-MVT mainframe printer in the 70’s. I can’t remember the printer model, but it worked with a print chain and when this sucker was printing you half expected smoke to start coming out of it because of the strain on the mechanism.