Asciitypewriter
Yunjoo Lee
I found ASCII art when I was researching old computer graphics. I was surprised that I forgot about ASCII art which I frequently used several years ago in Windows, creating letterforms and emojis with special characters. As computer graphics developed, ASCII art was replaced by other graphics such as emoticons. I had a nostalgic moment when I saw the ASCII art again and inspired by this I wanted to re-explore the ASCII art concept for my thesis.
Asciitypewriter is a website in which users can explore and customize letterforms that consist of 30 different foregrounds and 30 different backgrounds of special characters in 26 letterforms. In order to make all the possible outcomes I had to make 23400 letterforms, which is the combination of 30 foreground, 30 background and 26 alphabetic characters. After making a few hundred letterforms in InDesign, I found a better way to generate all the letter forms programmatically with help from my programmer friend, Heedo Kim, a Computer Science student from KAIST.