XTRA X2 - ASCII Art

After taking some time to view the ASCII website I was amazed at the various artwork pieces presented on the website. I was shocked when I found out that the website has been up since 1995. Now in 2018, twenty-three years later and the website is still being updated regularly with more creative works from various artist. Before viewing this website I honestly had no idea what ASCII stood for or what it even was. I now know that ASCII stand for “American Standard Code for Information Interchange” and that ASCII is basically a computer code in which people are use certain characters and symbols in order to create various artworks. I liked how at the bottom of the web page there are different tutorials that people can follow in order to create ASCII art. There is even a questioner that has questions that people can read and follow in order to learn more about ASCII. After learning a little about ASCII art I actually like it because it’s something that is different and I feel like it’s something that most people do not know how to easily create.

One thing I was surprised about was the section on the website that talked about fonts. I didn’t know how important font, its size, and its spacing was for coding and for creating the images. Each letter in the font has to be proportionally spaced out the same so that the pictures can be created and viewed easily. I have seen ASCII art before on social media or in emails but I have never paid attention to the font style used. It never crossed my mind that something like font style would be important for something like this.

As I looked through the images on the site some looked pretty simplistic while others looked more complex. I liked the images that were created using letters and symbols more than the ones that just used the lines. I’m currently taking a digital media class and for our first project we had to create a picture using code from the HTML5 Canvas program. For me personally the project was very challenging. Trying to create a picture from simple shapes and figuring out how to position the coordinates so the shape is in the right place was very hard and confusing. Now after learning a little about coding I have a new found respect for people who do it because it seems very challenging and time consuming, so patience is a must.

I was also shocked at how many categories this website had when it came to the pictures. The categories even had categories within them. I randomly selected and ended up clicking on the “Television” category. I was expecting to see current popular TV characters but I actually ended reliving my childhood in a weird way. Within the “Television” category there were tabs that had the names of various TV shows that I used to watch as a child. Looking through the pictures was kind of sad but also nostalgic in a way. It seems like it was such a long time ago that I watched those TV shows but I remember the good childhood memories associated with them.