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I remember the first time seeing someone type a sideways smiley face on a computer screen, also known as an emoticon. Prior to knowing what it was, other than gibberish, I couldn’t figure out what people were trying to type. Eventually, I asked someone what they were typing when seeing them perform that same action on their keyboard and they told me to tilt my head to the side and, to my surprise, it was a smiley face created from a colon and parenthesis. Obviously that isn’t the only way to make a smiley face; people can use different characters on a keyboard to achieve the same emoticon. People have also gone as far to make art out of these characters which is known as ASCII art.

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. In fact, this was a skill practiced by many of us. Now, this wasn’t something to click on or to type to view an image. The creator’s mind had to create an image around these ASCII characters. These characters could be created on a keyboard and when put together would assemble something on the screen.

A sideways smiley and emoticons in general are ASCII art at its purest, basic form. The key with ASCII art is that a fixed width font must be used, not a variable width font. The difference between a fixed width font and a proportional or variable width font is that characters with fixed widths have dimensions that remain constant while proportional width fonts have characters who dimensions vary. ASCII art only works when viewing and creating it with a fixed width font.

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