Image ASCII Art

The invention of computers changed a lot in our lives, and may just be one of the world’s biggest understatements. However, one particular area of life that computers had a subtle influence, even though not many thought possible, is art (or, more precisely, digital art).

Nowadays, when we think about digital art we tend to think of fractal/algorithmic art, dynamic painting, data-moshing, 2D pixel art, digital painting, and, of course, ASCII art among many others.

One could argue that ASCII text art is, in fact, the purest form of digital art. Interestingly enough, its roots can be traced back to 1898 when typewriter art was first acknowledged as an art form. However beautiful and interesting, ASCII art can be extremely, painstakingly difficult to produce.

Meet Image ASCII Art, a tiny Windows program that creates ASCII works of art for you by converting your favorite pictures to ASCII text art. Since the app is so small and considering it does not require installation, you can effortlessly store it in and access it from the cloud, or carry it with you on any basic storage device.

As one can imagine, working with this simple app is pretty much a walk in the park. Just launch the app, load the picture, and save the resulting ASCII art either as a picture (PNG, JPG, or BMP) or directly copy the whole resulting ASCII work directly to your computer’s clipboard.

Once the ASCII print has been rendered, you are provided with other interesting options. For example, you can also change the number of pixels per character, the overall character count, the font size, and the zoom level (which won’t affect the resulting rendering if you choose to export it).

While not an impressive application in any sense of the word, Image ASCII Art works just as intended. It allows anyone to create ASCII art based on their pictures without ever having to put in the work usually associated with creating these types of ASCII masterpieces.