My pre-ASCII art / pictorial typography / text art archive site is out now!

People have been making ASCII-like text art on letterpress for over 300 years, building pictures entirely out of metal type, ornaments, and rule. The practice has often been dismissed as "tasteless", "wasted effort" and "nothing to do with art", which is why I think it's gone largely undocumented. So, I've spent the last 8+ years collecting ~2500 of these works into an archive. Thanks to @adelfaure, who developed the site, it's now online for everyone to browse:
https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/
or read more about it at https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/?essay

@gdc So friggin' awesome @adelfaure

Fwiw, I did a #fosdem talk with Cowsay in #ascii
https://archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/minimalsyntaxes/

I never revealed it but the entire talk's storyline parallels the real adventures of Shackleton.

FOSDEM 2022 - Knowledge Management Through Minimal Syntaxes