ASCII Art vs Web 1.0
アスキーアート / ウェブ1.0
ASCII Art comes from Lettering and Web 1.0 from Digital Retro. 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.
Web 1.0
Reuses the naivety of the constrained early web as directness and charm.
| ASCII Art | Web 1.0 | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1960s– | 1990s |
| Family | Lettering | Digital Retro |
| Kind | Technique | Style |
| Cues | Monospace characters / Character density / Terminal screens / Single color | Blue links / Low-res GIFs / System fonts / Plain buttons |
| Best used for | Placing diagrams or titles inside terminals and logs without images · Signatures and distributed files that must work in text only environments | Showing affection for internet culture · An unpolished, approachable feel |
| Type | Pick a monospace face and measure its line to character ratio first | System sans and monospace |
| Composition | Fix the column width first and hard wrap so the figure holds | Left-aligned, borders, table-like division |
| Material | One color of text, characters ordered from sparse to dense for tone | White background, blue links, dithered images |
| Caution | Type and leading differ on the reader's side, so art distributed without a fixed column width collapses into noise somewhere else. | Don't regress actual accessibility. Separate the look from interaction quality. |