ANSI Art
ANSI art is text art in color. Where ASCII art is built from plain black-and-white characters, ANSI art adds a palette of colors and solid block characters, using special control codes to paint scenes that look far richer than ordinary text. It flourished on the bulletin board systems (BBSes) of the 1980s and 1990s and still has a devoted underground scene today. Here is what ANSI art is, where it came from, and how it differs from ASCII art.
What is ANSI art?
ANSI art is made from the extended character set of the IBM PC (code page 437) combined with ANSI escape codes — short control sequences that tell a terminal to change the text and background color or move the cursor.
The secret ingredient is the block characters: the full block █, half blocks ▀ ▄ ▌ ▐, and shaded blocks ░ ▒ ▓. By coloring these blocks and placing them precisely, artists could create smooth gradients, shading, and near-pixel graphics inside a text screen. A well-made ANSI piece can look more like a painting than typed text.
The BBS scene and history
ANSI art grew up on bulletin board systems, the dial-up communities people connected to by modem before the web. BBSes used ANSI codes to draw colorful welcome screens, menus, and logos, and a competitive art scene formed around them.
Groups like ACiD and iCE released monthly "art packs" through the early and mid 1990s, and artists signed their work and built reputations. The name comes from the ANSI X3.64 standard that defined the escape codes terminals used. As dial-up BBSes gave way to the graphical web in the late 1990s, ANSI art faded from the mainstream, but the community never fully disappeared — it lives on in demoscene events, terminal culture, and dedicated archives.
How ANSI escape codes work
An ANSI escape code begins with the ESC character (ASCII 27) followed by a bracket and parameters. To set a color you send a Select Graphic Rendition sequence; the terminal interprets it rather than printing it.
ESC[31m set text color to red ESC[42m set background to green ESC[1m bold / bright ESC[0m reset all attributes Example: ESC[31m█████ESC[0m -> a red bar
ANSI art vs ASCII art
The two are cousins, and the differences are clear once you know them. ASCII art uses only the 128 printable ASCII characters, is monochrome, and displays identically anywhere — an ASCII cat looks the same in any text box. ANSI art adds color and block characters via escape codes and code page 437, so it is more detailed but also more dependent on a terminal or viewer that understands those codes; paste it into a plain text field and you see the raw escape sequences instead.
Put simply: ASCII art is portable line art, ANSI art is colorful text painting. If you want to start with the more portable form, you can make your own ASCII art with the generator on this site and export plain text that works everywhere.