Appreciation For All Things ASCII

AsciiRock writes "Sick of seeing those chunky pixel art logos everywhere? Check out AsciiBlog, Contemporary ASCII, and Ascii Disko (no relation to me) for examples of artists inspired by plain text. ...and also click me! and click me! which made their way around the net some time back. Wonder how many other examples of BBS design sensibility there'll be this year. There's already Wired illustrators. 2002, year of ASCII design?"

Comments

that's not art

[jedie]

that's just rendering a picture with ASCII chars, where's the human effort? it's like a robot-made-painting.
and the flash movie? well, you can't just jiggle around with the chars. it defeats the whole purpose.

Re:that's not art

[Erik Fish]

Exactly! How can anyone mistake these automated conversions for "art" or even for "something that took more than ten minutes"? There was a time when people who tried to pass this shit off as the real thing were ridiculed and ostracised. Now it seems to be a big trend.

Why not a /. story with links to JED's ansimations or an interview with Lord Jazz or something?

There was a time when I wanted to see this genre make an impact on the art world, but after seeing that WIRED "illustration" (pasting photos inside text was one of the first things I learned in Photoshop) I think I'd rather it stayed obscure.

UNICODE FOREVER

[autopr0n]

Down with ascii and romantic elitism! Unicode for the web, Unicode for email, unicode FOREVER!

Well, it would make things more convenient.

It looks great, but what about the tools?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I want to find tools for bitmap/vector drawings, I have no trouble of getting it, but as far as an ASCII drawer, even the best tools are as primitive as Windows Paint (in fact, Windows Paint have better tools for drawing primitives). TheDraw is out of business long time ago, and lack of object-based features of current tools make every work tedious and frustrating.

As for converting images to ASCII, although there are many tools for that, finding the one that can detect edges, and take advantage of edge antilaiasing using the character is close to none, let alone exploiting Unicode. If you want to feed the raw image through OCR and convert them to text as output, you can forget about it.

Unless there are better tools for manipulating ASCII/Unicode art, it's doomed to become obsolete.

Re:It looks great, but what about the tools?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about you, but if everyone had to draw pictures in this old school, pixel-by-pixel work, we wouldn't have web comics, desktop publishing, or even a video game (except maybe Zork and rogue/hack, but even they have turned graphical in recent incarnations).

It is unfortunate some people perceive automated tools as cheats, when in fact they have helped many to express their creative talent. It resembles the attitude towards prosthetics or safety equipment. Needless to say, those with such attitude don't last very long...

Re:One of the great ASCII artists: - mod parent up

[wal9000]

I agree. This is actual hand-crafted ASCII art, not merely running some JPG through a converter.

The high-color conversions have a neat look, but as "art" it's underwhelming.

LYNX?!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it bother nobody that NONE of the pages linked above work in Lynx or links?!?!?!?!

What a shitty world we live in.

Re:funny ascii - ascii art farts

[perky]

Presumably you might want to try alt.ascii-art for daily posts by Tran (of ascii art fart fame), and other great new pictures. Note: these are hand crafted pictures, not those images made by running a jpeg through some program or other.