ASCII Art
アスキーアート / 1960s– / Technique / Lettering
Uses limited characters on a monospace grid as pixels, building image and tone from text alone.
At a glance
Visual cues
- Monospace characters
- Character density
- Terminal screens
- Single color
Best used for
- Placing diagrams or titles inside terminals and logs without images
- Signatures and distributed files that must work in text only environments
Use this style
Take the compact brief into a project or hand the structured version to an AI tool.
Detailed guidance and sourcesProduction rules, reference works, comparisons, research and citation formats
Dictionary entry
- Type
- Pick a monospace face and measure its line to character ratio first
- Composition
- Fix the column width first and hard wrap so the figure holds
- Material
- One color of text, characters ordered from sparse to dense for tone
- Caution
- Type and leading differ on the reader's side, so art distributed without a fixed column width collapses into noise somewhere else.
- Further study
- typewriter art / terminal culture / ANSI art
Related entries
- Web 1.0 (ウェブ1.0)Shared effects: Nostalgia / Play.Compare ASCII Art and Web 1.0
- Swiss Punk Typography (スイス・パンク・タイポグラフィ)Shared effects: Technique.Compare ASCII Art and Swiss Punk Typography
Often confused with
More from Lettering
Continue through styles in the same Lettering family, prioritised by shared effects.
- Teletext Art (テレテキスト・アート)Shared effects: Technique / Nostalgia / Play.
- Calligram (カリグラム)Shared effects: Play.
- Sign Painting (サインペインティング)Shared effects: Nostalgia.
Cite this entry
The dictionary is meant to be linked to. Take whichever form fits where you are writing.
- Link
- https://indexstyle.org/styles/ascii-art
- Markdown
- [ASCII Art — IndexStyle](https://indexstyle.org/styles/ascii-art)
- HTML
- <a href="https://indexstyle.org/styles/ascii-art">ASCII Art — IndexStyle</a>