I’ve been playing with ASCII art for several years and  I’ve tried to do a few things to push the boundaries a bit on this forgotten art form.  I’ve written my own image to ASCII conversion code, similar to libaa that you might be familiar with, specifically suited to my purposes.

I still have a few major ASCII art “ideas” that I’m working on, but here’s what I’ve accomplished so far:

Artscii

Not your grandfather’s ascii art.

Multi-layered ASCII Art

This image is made from 8 layers of ASCII characters

Phrase-based ASCII Art

ASCII art with embedded phrases.  The idea sounded awesome, but ultimately it just becomes a slightly confusing word-search.  There are 22 phrases “hidden” in this image:

ASCII Art Videos

This wasn’t my genius idea, of course, but I’ve played with it a bit.  I just have a simple script that uses mplayer to  extract frames and then generates ascii art from them.