Cool Word Art Internet-Style

If you've been online for awhile now, you'll remember when ASCII art was prominent. There were no flashy smiley faces, roses and other emoticons to be had. We had to make due with standard letters, numbers and punctuation, like this for a rose: @--'---. It was sort of like the charm the Star Wars series held before they added so much CGI that it became slick and glossy and... well... not quite the same.

Ok, so I'm a bit old-school, but there's no harm in looking back at and reminiscing! Here are some examples of text-based word art and how we've progressed over time. If nothing else, it's a fun way to kill time. Please preview these sites before browsing with kids!

Start with Joan Stark's ASCII Art Gallery (this link is to the Cartoon Characters section). This is a great example of pure ASCII art. In case you don't appreciate how challenging this is, these are created by typing out the characters, line-by-line in a basic text editor. Think it sounds easy? Open up Notepad or another plain text editor and try it out for yourself. In fact, I'd love to see your (family friendly) ASCII art!

Move on to the Text ASCII Art Generator. This site takes any text you enter and converts it into ASCII art. That's cool in itself, but what makes it extra fun is that you can decide what font you'd like to use. So, for example, you can see your name spelled out ASCII-style with dots and dashes and such, but you can decide if you'd like your name in "Big Money" (one of my favorites) or "Script" (for the fancier folks). Once you're done, you can cut and paste the result into your sig file, website or anywhere else you need to get your text message out.

End your tour with the very funky "Make ASCII" site. Ok, so this isn't true ASCII art. It takes a photo and renders it using strings of text. You can even specify custom text to use. But it's fun to see your face spelled out in your choice of text.

If you're super-proud of your ASCII creation, head on over to the forum and share with the rest of us.