The biggest struggle with posting ASCII art anywhere was always the formatting. Trying to get your work to use a fixed width font so it doesn't come out all warped looking. Also, making sure you added carriage returns at the end of each line of text. If you missed one you would soon find out if you posted it somewhere outside of the Notepad file you created the art in.

I don't know how the Twitter art is posted. That may be as complicated as making the art itself. A lot of the Twitter art seems to be design versus a picture/ image. The designs are nice. But, as an ASCII artist from the olden days, I am biased to love artists who use text to make images and manage to get them to post.

For a quick look at the most recent text art on Twitter search for the hash tags:

• #140Art
• #TwitterArt
• #SymbolArt

140 Artist on Twitter and the site 140 Art.com

tw1tt3rart on Twitter

T_witterArt on Twitter

twart1st on Twitter and Twitter Artist's blog

Newmoticons on Twitter and a tumblog.

ASCII_Art on Twitter - Not really ASCII Art but Twitter art and text art.

Daniel Rehn has a Twitter Art list.

TwingDings for Twitter

TwitClipArt - Twitter Drawings Library

Squidoo: One Line Art for Twitter - A good start to practice with. Try other ASCII art sites to find more one line art or begin creating your own.

Writing isn't the only way to play with words. Take them down a peg, look at them as just letters, forms on a page and you can make a different art with them. This isn't writing, its a whole new creation.

ASCII art is my personal favourite. But, there are other ways to get into the game of playing with your words. Typography is playing with fonts. What others have you found? Email me, I'd like to hear about them.

There is the whole riddle, puzzle, Scrabble issue. But, I'm looking at making plain ordinary everyday text into art.

Does anyone make ASCII art or am I the only retro geek? Someday, that ever illusive day, I want to make a whole website in just ASCII and ASCII art as illustrations/ graphics. I've seen one done in this way. It was very unique looking now. Back in the old days of dinosaur computers it would have been normal, if not cutting edge.

Anyway, this week take a break from fiddling with words and try something new. Play around and look at them in a whole new way. You and your keyboard will never be the same again.

Once upon a time a signature wasn’t much more than a show of good penmanship. Now a signature can be plain, just links, maybe a quote. Signatures in HTML are colourful and fancy but too clunky for downloading with email. I like ASCII art signatures best of all. ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, your basic everyday keyboard characters. Its become a tradition for ASCII art to only use the characters you can actually see on your keyboard. If you get into the alt key the art becomes ANSI art.

ASCII art has been used for more than just signatures. MUDs, IRC chat, ezines and of course newsgroup and email postings have used ASCII art and emoticons (smileys). Some people have printed out the bigger pictures for kids to colour. One thing all ASCII art has in common is a monospace font. This keeps it looking the same for all computers. If you are seeing ASCII art all warped, jumbled looking, try changing your font to FixedSys or Courier New. When ASCII art is included in a webpage it needs the HTML tag pre and /pre to keep the characters arranged with all the spaces in place.

Signatures should be short but not too cluttered. If you can keep it under 5 lines you’re doing great. I’ve made some which are four lines, the acceptable standard. I think the netiquette police aren’t so concerned with the length of ASCII signatures now that HTML is getting more popular. Still, you don’t want to annoy people with your signature, usually. Keep signatures less than 75 characters wide. Longer signatures can wrap and then they just look like a mess of text. Don’t forget to include your URL and if you use ASCII art, the artist’s initials.

In July 1996 while still a Net newbie, I thought the pictures made with keyboard characters were amazing. Making the pictures myself seemed so out of reach. I didn’t even know what they were called. I searched for keyboard art, typewriter art, anything and everything I could think of. I didn’t find what I was looking for. Finally, I found a site answering newbie questions and they emailed back and told me: ASCII Art! The mystery was solved!

I made my first keepable picture January 1998 (with the help of Albert and Joan on the Sig-List). ASCII Art became my special outlet for the drawing I have always wished I could do. Its been a few years and a lot of ASCII later. I have some signatures I especially like, some art I enjoy sharing on my personal site and a few really great ways of promoting my projects online. People notice ASCII art. Not everyone has my appreciation of it, but it does get noticed. Some people, like my husband, say it’s outdated, a throwback to the 70’s. Little does he know, ASCII Art is still evolving and it started on typewriters, not computers.

ASCII art isn’t using a program to turn a graphic into ASCII text. Anyone can open a program, that’s not art. ASCII art is created when someone uses a minimal amount of data to represent an object. Of course, its not always easy to see, the whole eye of the beholder thing… But its really impressive what some people can do with just a few keyboard characters and a lot of imagination and creativity.

This was originally posted to the BackWash site, October 12, 2001. I wrote there several years before the site closed.