Everyone Is Building ASCII Generators
Brand Designer for a fast-growing educational app, maintaining brand consistency across marketing, email, web, and social, from asset systems to redesigned email templates.
ASCII art is all over my X’s feed. Not sure whether it is nostalgia or something we designers are genuinely excited about building yet, new filter generator apps keep appearing every week.
The tools like ASCIIStudio, ASCII Magic, asc11 - lets you drop an image and watch it dissolve into columns of characters, a grid of asterisks and slashes that somehow resolves into a face, a landscape, a logo. The Creative Bloq crowd recently lost their minds over an o3-generated converter because, what it used to take a hobbyist hours of hand-tweaking now renders in seconds.
ASCII art started when early printers and terminals couldn't render images, so people used the characters they had to generate visuals. The genre developed its own aesthetic: the constraint was the style. Artists have been making images from text long before there was software to do it. Keira Rathbone has spent years building intricate portraits and landscapes using nothing but a typewriter, applying the same digit component logic. Art like this might be seen as long tweets at X, and it used to be part of primitive social expressions on the internet.
Coming back to tools, Figma Make lets designers prototype the interface before a single line of backend code exists. The pipeline from "I want to make this" to "this is live" has collapsed to the point where the tool itself becomes the content.
I find it quite interesting how the output has become the advertisement, turning our heads toward productivity instead of pure art. The "homogenization" of trends doesn't only affect the artistic side of it, but also the creative thinking behind product development. Anyway, I'll keep playing with them but, I resist building my own version. I can't deny it's inspiring. The goal is to use this as inspiration.
ASCII art is all over my X’s feed. Not sure whether it is nostalgia or something we designers are genuinely excited about building yet, new filter generator apps keep appearing every week.
The tools like ASCIIStudio, ASCII Magic, asc11 - lets you drop an image and watch it dissolve into columns of characters, a grid of asterisks and slashes that somehow resolves into a face, a landscape, a logo. The Creative Bloq crowd recently lost their minds over an o3-generated converter because, what it used to take a hobbyist hours of hand-tweaking now renders in seconds.
ASCII art started when early printers and terminals couldn't render images, so people used the characters they had to generate visuals. The genre developed its own aesthetic: the constraint was the style. Artists have been making images from text long before there was software to do it. Keira Rathbone has spent years building intricate portraits and landscapes using nothing but a typewriter, applying the same digit component logic. Art like this might be seen as long tweets at X, and it used to be part of primitive social expressions on the internet.
Coming back to tools, Figma Make lets designers prototype the interface before a single line of backend code exists. The pipeline from "I want to make this" to "this is live" has collapsed to the point where the tool itself becomes the content.
I find it quite interesting how the output has become the advertisement, turning our heads toward productivity instead of pure art. The "homogenization" of trends doesn't only affect the artistic side of it, but also the creative thinking behind product development. Anyway, I'll keep playing with them but, I resist building my own version. I can't deny it's inspiring. The goal is to use this as inspiration.