ASCII Art

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a basic set of 128 symbols. This type of art is a specific graphic design technique that creates images from printable characters from the ASCII set. The most basic example of this type of art is the smiley :) However, much more complex images can be created. A typewriter style font is most commonly used when creating this art, because this type of art predates computers, it has just evolved with the introduction and advancement in technology (Randall, 2015).

This type of art is created for many different reasons. First of all it can be argued that it is the most universal computer art on the planet. This type of art is very accessible to everyone because all computer systems are capable of creating art in this way. There is no need for expensive computer programs such as Adobe Photoshop, just a simple text editor or Microsoft Word Processor can be used. To add, this type of picture creates a much smaller file size compared to a GIF etc. The images are also easy to cut and paste (Randall, 2015).

Abbey Road (Parberry, no date)

(MickiiEditions, no date)

Zebra (Wilinckx, 2003)

If

Concrete/Graphic Poems

(Archivist Press, No Date)

Typewriter Example

(Rathbone, no date)