What ASCII art is
People often search for this as an ASCII picture generator. To be clear about what you get here: it makes big lettering and banners from your words, not a picture converted from a photo.
ASCII art is pictures and lettering made from ordinary text characters. It started in the days of typewriters and early computer terminals, when screens could only show text, and it's still loved by programmers, gamers and anyone who likes a retro look.
This generator draws each letter of your word on a five-row grid and fills it with the character you choose. The letter shapes were drawn by hand for GlyphKite, so they're simple, bold and easy to read.
How to use it
- Type a word or a short phrase. Press Enter to start a new line (up to four lines).
- Choose what to draw with: solid blocks, #, @, stars and more.
- Tap Copy ASCII art and paste it where you want it.
Where ASCII art looks right
ASCII art only lines up when every character has the same width. That's called a monospace font. Good places to paste it:
- Code comments and README files
- Terminal welcome messages and scripts
- Chat apps inside a code block (in many apps, wrap the text in three backticks: ```)
- Plain-text emails and notes
In normal text, like a social media caption, the letters may come out crooked because spaces and letters have different widths there.
Tips
- Short words work best. Each letter is about six characters wide, so a ten-letter word needs about sixty characters of width.
- Hash (#) characters are the safest choice for code and terminals, since they're plain ASCII. Blocks (█) look bolder but are Unicode.
- On a phone, turn the screen sideways to see wide banners.
For smaller decorations, try text symbols or kaomoji.
ASCII pics, artwork and dot art
People search for ASCII pics or ASCII artwork when they want a picture made from keyboard characters. The banner tool above covers lettering. For dot art, try the dots set on the symbols page, and for small keyboard images like faces, the kaomoji collection has hundreds to copy.