Visual Poetry: Concrete Poetry and Calligrams

Concrete poetry is a form of text art, like ASCII art and typewriter art. It’s also poetry, the genre known as visual poetry. Concrete poetry uses words and drawings to illustrate a poem. The words are in the image. The text itself forms a visible picture on the page, like a silhouette.

Calligram seems to be another word for concrete poetry.… Read the rest

How Do you Make Emoticons and Text ASCII Smileys?

How Do you Make Emoticons and Text ASCII Smileys?Emoticons, are also known as smileys/ smilies. Emoticons are used to show or explain emotion in the context of your writing. They are a great way to use text, and show emotion, in an otherwise flat email. Emoticons can make communication clear when you are teasing versus being serious. I’ve also used them to make sure someone understands what I have written was not meant to be taken overly seriously when I am sending a message about something important.… Read the rest

Japanese ASCII Text Art: Shift JIS

I used to label all the Japanese ASCII art as ANSI art and just click on by. It was a snobby attitude, but I was trying to keep the standards of ASCII art – which is so often confused or cheated on with ANSI art and assorted other versions of text art which don’t stick to the standard keyboard characters, no frills.… Read the rest

How to Stop Emoticon Addiction and Use Fewer Emoticons

An emoticon is a terrible thing to waste.

How to Stop Emoticon Addiction and Use Fewer Emoticons

Emoticons (aka smileys) are fun, easy and add a lightness to any email or forum posts. When you want to add emotion, feelings or mood to your typed words you can just slip in an emoticon. 🙂 They’re so simple to make, to remember and no-fuss.

Of course, some times we use a few too many.… Read the rest

FAQ from LocalColorArts.com

This domain (LocalColorArts.com) is for sale. I copied their ASCII Art FAQ. It may be repeated from information on Wikipedia, but it’s worth keeping around.

Ascii Art Information

ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII).… Read the rest

Alice in Wonderland Visual Poem

Standard red-cloth Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865 (1876 reprint shown here) (interior page). This is the mouse’s tale/tail, an early example of concrete poetry. Its typography echoes that of the hand-drawn tail that Carroll included in his gift manuscript to Alice Liddell. The editorial content and typography of the tale evolved over the course of the Carroll-directed Victorian editions (and posthumous editions) of Wonderland.

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Clip Art Guide Application for About.com

I’ve just applied for the Clip Art topic at About.com. It would be great to get in and start promoting clip art and getting more people making their own graphics and even drawing.

Here is what I sent for my application. If nothing else, I like to remember what I wrote. :

I tend to draw clip art rather than write about it.

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I am a Deviant Artist

I joined up at DeviantArt. Looking around the site before now I thought I was way out of my element there. But, they do have some writing sections and, better still, an ASCII art gallery/ section.

I’m going to post some of my ASCII which I’ve made into image files and see what (if any) feedback I get.… Read the rest