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Text art tools

hlnet.notion.site

95 pointssurprisetalk26 comments

This is my list, thanks for sharing!

It started out as a list for ASCII and textmode art editors but grew to include all kinds of alternative design tools. I've hosted two workshops where the assigment is to create a printed zine without the use of any Adobe software. I give this list to the participants to explore. The scans of these zines and more info can be found here:

https://tekstien-marginaalien-keskus.aalto.fi/residenssi/hei...

I think its crazy that my University (Aalto) pays over a million euros in licencing fees to Adobe every year while the design teachers are chronically overworked and understaffed. My ultimate goal is to persuade the institution to ditch Adobe and switch to FOSS tools, and hire more staff & teachers.

Nice! Great goal and very cool zines!

One of the.big hurdles is pantone support. At some point most places want their design to hit the real world and pantone has that market cornered. I dont just mean the technical parts pantone has expensive licensing that most FOSS doesnt and wont ever pay.

There is more than one toll troll.in that marker.

I am guessing that pantone is a bunch of colors that are coded a certain way? Isn't there a common mechanism across design software? Like PDF is the platform agnostic way of sharing documents?

It is a licensing mechanism, a list of ink formulas, and (most importantly) an entire eco-system of ink swatches and sample books --- a designer can get a customer to agree to a colour, tear off a pair of ink chips, give one to the customer and one to the printer, and the expectation is that the printed piece will _exactly_ match the chips.

There are lots of alternatives --- the Glass Container Manufacturing Institute has a set of swatches which are used for packaging which the industry has agreed on.

That said, there isn't much spot colour work left, and most of what there is, is brand-specific, or done for budgetary reasons (long runs w/ just two colours).

There is no Pantone Support in Adobe Software since 2022/2023.

Oh wow really? I didnt know that. Did they launch a competing service or something?

i see pablodraw up top - you know your stuff and have good taste!

Nice. I love zines and I’ll enjoy checking out those other links.

So good, thanks for compiling this list.

Slanted magazine did an issue recently on digital tools and compiled their own list:

https://www.slanted.de/news/digital-tools/

The issue has screenshots of many of them: https://www.slanted.de/product/slanted-magazine-47-digital-t...

The layout of the publication is almost unbearable… Considering that it’s a magazine a bout (graphic-) design I’d say they failed miserably.

Well, so was the Dada journal, but experimentation is supposed to push boundries.

https://monoskop.org/Dada_(journal)

Couldn't agree more. The issue here is that it doesn't feel experimental or innovative at all. It just follows some weak design trends.

Deleted.

I somehow managed to reply to the wrong thread.

Made me instantly think of Glenn Reid's nifty "TouchType.app" for the NeXT, which I still really miss --- these days I just convert to paths and use Macromedia Freehand/MX (or a proprietary tool for the CNC machine I support on the side).

The ASCII playground is missing:

https://play.ertdfgcvb.xyz

I made these to create styled text art for the MOTD of my university's HPC login node:

https://github.com/ScriptSmith/tart

https://tart.sh/

Hah, another tart: https://github.com/jtdaugherty/tart/

super cool roster! niche text generators come to mind, e.g., text version of regex train tracks / git traces come to mind. png/svg version https://regexper.com/#%5Cd%7B5%7D%28-%5Cd%7B4%7D%29%3F idk if any robust ascii lib exists, same for things like root cause or swimlanes etc.

have done some 1-off 1-shots of similar for AI input/output is primary frame of reference, and plenty of others have attempted same to varying success / nice to see ASCII graphics get some new life in them

I built this [1] for myself so that I can comment lgtm in PR comments with an ASCII art. Pretty silly but fun.

[1]: LGTM ASCII Art as a Service - https://lgtms.app/

Wrote this for fun over a decade ago. Still around.

https://animasci.com/

How does notion manage to make this site, which is essentially just a static table, take several seconds to show any meaningful content?

Tell me about it... I have plans to migrate this to a static HTML at some point.

How about are.na?

I’d be willing to help with that, pro bono. I like my tech minimal, so I’m a fan of small and fast html/css with a bit of JS when necessary. Today this is probably a quick project with an AI tool and a Notion MCP.

Contact info in my profile.

I’m also the creator of the minimalist framework, Neat CSS.

https://neat.joeldare.com

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