ASCII Art vs ANSI Art (BBS Scene)
アスキーアート / ANSIアート
Both sit in Lettering, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. One is technique and the other style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
ASCII Art
Uses limited characters on a monospace grid as pixels, building image and tone from text alone.
ANSI Art (BBS Scene)
Login screens and group art packs drawn in the 16-color text mode of the BBS age. Block-character shading and inter-group competition made the summit of pre-web screen decoration.
| ASCII Art | ANSI Art (BBS Scene) | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1960s– | 1985–1997 |
| Family | Lettering | Lettering |
| Kind | Technique | Style |
| Cues | Monospace characters / Character density / Terminal screens / Single color | 16-color text mode / Shaded block characters / Art-group signatures / The login-screen format |
| Best used for | Placing diagrams or titles inside terminals and logs without images · Signatures and distributed files that must work in text only environments | Decorating a splash screen or heading where only characters are available · Bringing signature and crew credit into a distributed pack of work |
| Type | Pick a monospace face and measure its line to character ratio first | Letterforms built from block characters and completed with box-drawing pieces |
| Composition | Fix the column width first and hard wrap so the figure holds | Eighty columns respected while the vertical runs on like a scroll |
| Material | One color of text, characters ordered from sparse to dense for tone | Sixteen foreground and eight background colors, shading made by character density |
| Caution | Type and leading differ on the reader's side, so art distributed without a fixed column width collapses into noise somewhere else. | Shown in a proportional environment the columns break and the picture is gone, so building without fixing display conditions destroys it. |