Animated ASCII Art for Web Pages

249 points55 comments8 hours ago
boguscoder

This looks aesthetically pleasing but this is not ASCII Art it seems, where’s ascii? All those differently sized dots are not ascii chars, are they? Perhaps this is unicode-art?

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gavmor

Gorgeous, impressive, well done—

But it strikes me as an affectation of technical austerity, i.e. you’re borrowing the credibility of a constrained medium without embracing its constraints.

Again, it's very pretty but... it's a bit like reconfiguring your Tesla to look more like a Citroën 2CV.

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BugsJustFindMe

I see nothing being animated because my system is set to prefer reduced motion. That's a cool accommodation, but I wish at least the demo page made that more obvious.

Also, the art scenes section is not ASCII.

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robbomacrae

Thats awesome. I did something similar (much smaller scale) for Claude Code/Pi to show how much it's working https://github.com/robdmac/flow

But this ASCII Art reminds me of my original desire to have something for each server I SSH into to help me keep a mental map of where I am. I'm not SSH'ing into servers anymore but if I was, I'd totally be trying to remake these scenes on the terminal!

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burmask

I kept scrolling down and my amazement grew as I could see all fun the op had making this library. Split-flap [https://ascii.rest/split-flap/] is awesome. And the nature ones [https://ascii.rest/fern/] got me thinking I need a digital frame to display them on. Would be some cool wall art. This ASCII sets a relaxed mood - except for that vibrating spinners page @ZeWaka :). Thank you for your contribution op!

bredren

Neat. Some of my earliest online contributions were to local dial-up BBSs. I spent entire days making animated ascii sequences in the theme of the board.

smusamashah

This reminds of another awesome actually ASCII animation library https://play.ertdfgcvb.xyz/

thih9

“Scenes” look like some roundabout attempt at dithering - not what I expected.

The rest is also very maximalist and ornamental. I like them as animations but wouldn’t like them as part of UI or TUI.

cousin_it

This looks cool! I wonder if the same feeling can be achieved without a fixed grid though. Some kind of pointilist or halftone rendering, but with free positioning of points.

kirth_gersen

beautiful. i don't see the pieces as animated, however. perhaps I am missing something?

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arikwald

Beautiful! that's the true meaning of converting digits into art through custom algorithms. I reviewed the code and it's quite impressive. What I'm curious about is whether you had a predefined "bitmap-like" file which already contained all the values and then once loaded you applied the specific modification/animation algorithm to generate this unique effect. Reminds me the fascinating game graphics we had during the 80s on computers back then :). Yes back then I was fascinated with this kind of graphics, still am :)

ZeWaka

Your spinners page is vibrating extremely angrily: https://ascii.rest/spinners, also some other components like the progress bar - whenever width changes.

gfat

Beautiful work. I did a similar effect for docs using a page turning animation. Might reach for this in the future.

marinhero

I was mesmerized by the animation in https://omp.sh/ yesterday but this takes it to the next level. What makes something like this be prevalent now if ASCII has been around for so long? is it just the trend?

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5-0

For new/young people who might wonder why old geezers sound all gatekeepy, this is what "ASCII art" used to mean in the before times: https://asciiarena.se

davidcollantes

It would be awesome to be able to create these. If author is around, would you consider a creation tool as well?

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sosodev

Not ASCII and a lot of art looks off and has broken animations.

I’m not one to say that all AI art is slop, but there’s so little effort here. Why exactly are so many praising this?

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cush

That dithering is on point

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cromka

Cool, but the rows are shuffled here for about a half of those animations

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lordkrandel

wonderful

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shevy-java

Watching Star Wars in ASCII is fun.