ASCII art are pictures drawn with printable letters, numbers, and symbols in the ASCII character set. The most common ASCII art today is the smiley face :). This is a sideway face drawn with a colon followed by a closing parenthesis. In the 1980s, prior to HTML and advanced graphics, combination of ASCII characters where used by bulletin board services (BBS) - the predecessor to today's websites - to create their logo or other graphical elements. These were crude images by today's standard and it illustrates the level of 'graphics' available at the time.

This tool will take a color or black-and-white image file and convert it into ASCII art. To use, drag and drop your image in the upload area below and click Upload. This ASCII art generator is based on the creation of Artur Graniszewski.