ASCII art

I used to like making ASCII art, back in the Indian summer of MUDs and MOOs c. 2003–6. I used a text editor in my MUD client, KoeMoe, which supported overtype at undefined horizontal positions, making it perfect for such work. You’d draw in black-and-white first and then add markup for colours (16 of them, to be precise). The markup made it kind of hard to see what you’d drawn until it was rendered.

These days I’d probably prefer to make Unicode art, but monospaced fonts with a good coverage of Unicode are rare. It seems against the spirit of the art to make pictures that only look right in Everson Mono, or any single typeface for that matter.

Like pixel art, ASCII art (or ANSI art, at least) has had something of a revival with the popularity of indie games, for example in Dwarf Fortress.