Playground

🎨👨🏾‍🎨Retro ASCII art in Sticky Notes

I warned you readers several issues ago that I love Sticky Notes, here is more proof.

This obscure art form is from the time before Emojis. Emojis are actually the replacement for ASCII art that people used in emails.

They start with the very simple to the more complex:

:)  @->—>—  ><((((‘>  (===||:::::::::::::::> 

Back when these were “popular” all characters (letters) were the same size. Today our fonts have different character widths, proportional spacing, etc. This leads to better looking text overall, but ASCII art is more of a challenge now. 

Koala Go Sticky Notes use one of these modern fonts, and also have line centering so the challenge level goes up again, 🤣 

But it is possible to convert old ASCII art (which can still be found online) to look good on Sticky Notes. Usually I just paste the original into a Sticky Note, then start adding and subtracting spaces to get everything to line up. After it looks right I copy it and save it elsewhere (as a mac user I use Notes and have a folder of them) to use again later in another Sticky Note.

I know what you are thinking “I could just use an image”, that’s true, these are just for fun, and times when an image is not the way to go.