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ASCII art

Introduction

You can find out more about ascii art on the relevant newsgroup news:alt.ascii-art. In essence, ASCII art tries to create pictures using the ASCII character set. This makes great artwork to put in signatures and the like.

This page describes the stages my signature Evolution went through. It sort of illustrates the evolution of a piece of ASCII art. All of this was inspired by a great picture received by email one day.

All the artwork on this page is Copyright © 1999 Alex Schröder.

Evolution

January 1999

http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/6120/       %o  /             _    
                         %o         _%o_/       <b--+    \  %O    ¦ \   
           %o       odMMp'         / M           M /      \dB--+__¦_/__ 
   ..oooOOO/       /\   /\        /  \\         /`L        `L\_   __|__

February 1999

C. J. Randall http://www.shieldwolf.demon.co.uk twiddled the monkey a little bit, and I added a little tail to the four legged mammal.

http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/6120/       %o  /             _
                         %o         _%o_/       <b--+    \  %O    ¦ \
           %o     .oodMMp'         / M           M /      \dB--+__¦_/__
   ..oooOOO/       /\   /\         \ >>         /`L        `L\_   __|__

After some more talking with C. J. Randall, I realized that using the broken bar `¦' was not acceptable: it wasn't pure ASCII. He suggested a semikolon `;', but I went with the exclamation mark `!' instead. The semikolon made the monitor look "fuzzy". I also tried the non-broken bar `|', but then the monitor looked dead.

Compare the different screens:

old:              fuzzy:            dead:             new:
            _               _                 _                 _   
  \  %O    ¦ \    \  %O    ; \      \  %O    | \      \  %O    ! \  
   \dB--+__¦_/__   \dB--+__;_/__     \dB--+__|_/__     \dB--+__!_/__
    `L\_   __|__    `L\_   __|__      `L\_   __|__      `L\_   __|__

This is what I ended up with. Note how the exclamation mark emphasises the monitor.

http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/6120/       %o  /             _
                         %o         _%o_/       <b--+    \  %O    ! \
           %o     .oodMMp'         / M           M /      \dB--+__!_/__
   ..oooOOO/       /\   /\         \ >>         /`L        `L\_   __|__

I also received some suggestions to reduce the size of the worm and the mammal, but I somehow could not relate to the result...


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http://www.geocities.com/kensanata/ascii.html / Alex Schroeder <kensanata@gmail.com> / updated: 2000-12-07 / significant changes: 2000-07-20