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ASCII Art Archive

Decades of ASCII drawings sorted by subject, from cats to warships, every one of them ready to copy and paste.

Opens in a new tab. We do not control this site and it may have changed since we catalogued it.

How to get the most from it

ASCII Art Archive sits in Text & Font Toys under Make, filed as rabbit hole.

  • Open it when the evening is free. It has no natural stopping point.
  • Use a laptop or desktop computer — we file it as desktop only.
  • It works with the sound off, so it is fine on a train or in a quiet office.
  • No account needed — you can start without signing up.
  • Go in expecting something nostalgic, weird and funny.

About this category: Fancy text converters, ASCII art makers, typography experiments and the specific pleasure of putting words through something that mangles them.

Good for

  • A long evening with nothing planned
  • A trip back to the older internet
  • Seeing the internet at its least explicable
  • A reliable laugh
  • A quiet break at your desk
  • Trying it with zero commitment

ASCII Art Archive: quick answers

Is ASCII Art Archive free?

Yes. ASCII Art Archive is free to use and needs no account.

Do I need an account to use ASCII Art Archive?

No. You can use ASCII Art Archive without signing up for anything.

Does ASCII Art Archive work on a phone?

Not well. We file ASCII Art Archive as desktop only, so open it on a laptop or desktop computer.

Is ASCII Art Archive safe for work?

Yes, we file it as safe for work. It also works muted.

How long does ASCII Art Archive take?

We file it as "Rabbit hole": Clear your evening. We warned you.

More in Text & Font Toys

All 14 in Text & Font Toys
  • Draws boxes, arrows and flowcharts entirely out of monospace characters, for diagrams that live inside code comments.

  • Chrome, flames and bevelled gradients — the 2003 logo generator, still online and still producing exactly that.

  • Home of the format that turns text into large letters made of smaller letters, with the whole font archive attached.

  • Every symbol, alphabet and text decoration you might want to paste somewhere, organised well enough to find one.

Same mood: nostalgic

All nostalgic sites
  • Thousands of educational films saved from the skip — driver safety, dating advice, duck and cover — digitised by one collector.

    • 10 min
    • Sound on
  • Two decades of other people's terrible family portraits, submitted willingly and captioned by the people in them.

  • Eight hours on the networks that existed before the internet reached homes, released free by the person who made it.

    • 1 hr+
    • Sound on
  • Chiptune tracker with a whole song's worth of channels, shareable as a URL that contains the entire tune inside it.

    • 10 min
    • Sound on
    • Desktop

Keep exploring

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