About ASCII art and Jgs font - Velvetyne
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About ASCII art and Jgs font<br>Authors<br>Adel Faure<br>Publication date<br>May 30, 2023<br>Keywords<br>Font release<br>Tribute<br>Design process
Typefaces involved<br>Jgs font
Ce contenu existe en Français<br>Introduction
I am Adel Faure, ASCII artist operating within the Mistigris and Textmode Friends collectives. I’ve been generously invited by Velvetyne to publish Jgs Font on their foundry. Jgs Font is a typeface that I’ve created as a tribute to artist Joan G. Stark and that I use to make ASCII art (see specimen).
In this article I contextualize what ASCII art is, who Joan G. Stark is, what could be seen as a “history of text mode arts”, what does ASCII Art means today, and what are the characteristics of the Jgs font.
I’d like to sincerely thank Heikki Lotvonen for sharing two iconographic references with me (The Printer’s Grammar, John Smith, 1755 and Improvisation, late 18th century) as well as for his text ASCII art : From a Commodity Into an Obscurity, that helped me greatly.
I’d also like to thank Raphaël Bastide, Ève Gauthier and Vincent Maillard for helping me review and finish this text.
Last but not least, many thanks to Ariel Martín Pérez for his proofreading and and for the English translation of this text.
Good read!
What is ASCII Art?
Starry Night, Veni, Vidi, ASCII, 2020It isn’t that simple to explain what ASCII Art means. More than defining a well established practice, ASCII Art blurs the habitual distinction between image and text, in the art world, and between “graphic interface” and “text mode,” in the informatics domain.
Strictly speaking, the expression designates pictures composed by using the 128 characters contained in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (shortened as ASCII). Even if the terms “Text Art” or “Textmode Art” are also used, “ASCII Art” or just “ASCII” has become a way of naming all pictures produced with the help of typographic elements. In 1999, in The History of ASCII (text) Art, Joan G. Stark describes ASCII in the following way:
They are “non-graphical graphics”. Its palette is limited to the symbols and characters that you have available to you on your computer keyboard. [1]
A self-portrait by Joan G. Stark featuring her standard signatureJoan G. Stark, A.K.A. jgs or Spunk, is probably the most popular and prolific ASCII artist of the 1990s and the ’00s, who left a strong imprint on online amateur practices and aesthetics. Stark started making ASCII art in 1995 as part of the newsgroup on USENET. Being passionate about folklore and popular art, she devoted herself to represent in a “line style” way (that could be seen as close to the “ligne claire” style in comics) countless mythological creatures, animals, landscape elements, objects and scenes of everyday life. She published the totality of her drawings as well as texts about ASCII, its practice and its history, on her website www.ascii-art.com. Even if the website is no longer online, it can be accessed through many links like this one..
Her definition of ASCII as “non-graphical graphics” plays with the ambiguity of the English word “graphic”, which either means a figurative object or an element of a graphic interface. At the time of Stark’s phrase, the first digital social networks (Usenet, BBS, Minitel, Ceefax, etc.), still very popular back then, worked in “text mode”. They present user interfaces where the screen is divided in a grid in which each case can display a single glyph. As these interfaces disappeared in favor of graphic interfaces, Stark underlines with irony the ambiguous status of ASCII art: the presence of graphic elements in text environments becomes this oddity that is ASCII.
Even as she embraces its complexity, Stark summarizes the practice of ASCII to something very simple: it’s a way of drawing with what a computer keyboard provides. “Its palette is limited to the symbols and characters that you have available to you on your computer keyboard.” Based on this statement, one can only imagine that each system associated with a keyboard would produce a different ASCII. That’s the reason we can find terms like PETSCII associated with the Commodore PET/CBM, ANSI with the BBS (Bulletin Board Systems), ATASCII with Atari, Shift-JIS with the Katakana mode of Japanese keyboards, Teletext with Videotext (Prestel, Minitel). In this galaxy, the expression “ASCII” refers more specifically to the Amiga styles (oldschool and newschool), or the Usenet styles (line-style and solid-style). Each one of these ASCII have their own scene, with their groups, their artists and sometimes even their own publishing platform.
www.asciiarena.se - Amiga ASCII
www.16colo.rs - ANSI
www.csdb.dk -...