Ascii Art Maker

Make ASCII art in seconds. Upload a photo or logo and the maker turns it into text characters — dense ones like @ and # for dark areas, light ones like . and : for bright areas — at the width you choose. Or type a word and get a big banner built from characters for code comments, README files, terminal greetings and social posts.

How image-to-ASCII conversion works

The maker shrinks your image to the width you choose — one pixel per character — and measures the brightness of each pixel. It then picks a character whose visual “weight” matches: dense characters such as @, # and % for dark areas and light ones such as ., : and spaces for bright areas. Because text characters are roughly twice as tall as they are wide, the image height is halved so the result is not stretched. The contrast slider spreads brightness values apart so edges and features stand out.

Choosing settings

Picking the right image

• High-contrast images convert best: silhouettes, logos, portraits with strong lighting.
• Plain or removed backgrounds keep the subject clear.
• Crop tightly — at 80 characters wide, small details disappear.
• Line art and icons look great with the Simple character set.
• Busy photos with lots of mid-tones become muddy; boost contrast or try a larger width.

Text banners

Banner mode draws your text in a bold font on a hidden canvas and converts it into characters, producing big letters like classic terminal banners. Use short words — names, project titles, “HELLO”, “WELCOME” — because every letter takes several characters of width. Banners are popular at the top of source files, in README files, in command-line tool start-up messages, server login banners and plain-text emails.

Displaying ASCII art correctly

ASCII art only lines up in a monospaced font, where every character has the same width — Consolas, Menlo, Courier, or the font in your terminal and code editor. In proportional fonts the columns drift and the picture falls apart. When posting online, wrap art in a code block (three backticks in Markdown, Discord and many forums) so it keeps its spacing. Some chat apps trim repeated spaces; the Simple set with “.” instead of spaces survives better.

A brief history

Pictures made from typewriter characters predate computers, and early computer users printed ASCII art on line printers in the 1960s and 70s. Bulletin board systems, Usenet and early internet culture made it a folk art form, with signature blocks, banners and elaborate scenes. FIGlet, released in 1991, popularised big text banners from character fonts. Today ASCII art lives on in code comments, terminal tools, game jams and retro-style social posts.

Worked example

A developer wants their project logo at the top of a README. They upload the logo PNG, set the width to 70 characters, choose the Standard set and raise contrast to 1.6 so the logo edges are crisp. The preview shows a 70 × 30 character block. They copy it into a Markdown code block and push it — and use Banner mode to add the project name in big letters above it.

ASCII vs Unicode art

Strict ASCII uses only the 95 printable characters on an American keyboard. The Blocks set uses Unicode shading characters (█▓▒░), which give smoother tones but may not display in every font or older system. For maximum compatibility — emails, old terminals, code comments — stick to the Standard, Detailed or Simple sets.

Tips for great results

• Crop to the subject before uploading; empty background wastes characters.
• For faces, increase contrast and try widths between 80 and 120.
• For logos, use the Simple set and a width that matches the logo’s detail.
• Preview the result in the same font and size where it will be used.
• Invert when pasting into dark-mode editors and terminals so bright areas stay bright.
• Save a few versions at different widths — small ones for chat, large ones for posters.

Using ASCII art in code

Banners in source code are usually placed inside a comment block at the top of a file. In JavaScript or C, use /* … */; in Python, a string or # comments; in shell scripts, # comments. Keep lines under your project’s line-length limit, and avoid characters that have special meaning in your language (such as a closing */ inside a C comment). Command-line tools often print a banner when they start — store it as a multi-line string and print it once.

Printing ASCII art

ASCII art can be printed as a poster: download the text file, open it in a text editor with a monospaced font, set a small font size (6–8 pt) so the full width fits the page, and print. Larger widths (200+ characters) produce surprisingly detailed images when printed large and viewed from a distance.

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