June 18, 2026
ASCII? More like UX-ii
About ASCII art and Jgs font (2023)
A love letter to keyboard art sparked a side quest: readers roasting the website layout
TLDR: Adel Faure published Jgs Font as a tribute to iconic keyboard artist Joan G. Stark, celebrating the history of making pictures with text characters. Readers, however, were distracted by the site’s layout and joked that finding the article felt harder than understanding the art itself.
A heartfelt tribute to old-school keyboard drawings somehow turned into a mini comment-section roast, and honestly, that became the show. In the article, artist Adel Faure introduces Jgs Font, a typeface inspired by legendary ASCII artist Joan G. Stark, whose pictures were made entirely from keyboard symbols. It’s a sweet, artsy history lesson about how people turned plain text into images long before today’s glossy apps took over.
But the community? They immediately locked onto a far more relatable crisis: where is the article even hiding? The loudest reaction came from readers baffled by the site design, with one commenter saying the story appeared in “the exact place I wouldn’t look.” Ouch. Instead of discussing the romance of text-made art, people were squinting at a page layout that allegedly gave just as much room to metadata as to the actual story. In true internet fashion, the conversation swerved from digital art history to a universal online complaint: why do beautiful websites sometimes forget to be readable?
That tension became the real drama. On one side, there’s admiration for preserving a niche art form built from simple characters and pure patience. On the other, there’s the accidental comedy of a design-forward page about accessibility and visual culture being accused of making its own text hard to find. It’s almost too perfect: an article celebrating text mode got people yelling, basically, “please let us see the text.”
Key Points
- •Adel Faure wrote the article to introduce ASCII art and present Jgs Font, a typeface he created as a tribute to Joan G. Stark.
- •The article defines ASCII art strictly as images made from the 128 characters of ASCII, while noting the term is also used more broadly for text-based images.
- •Joan G. Stark is described as a highly influential ASCII artist who began publishing work in 1995 through the <alt.ascii-art> USENET newsgroup.
- •Stark characterized ASCII as 'non-graphical graphics,' a phrase Faure connects to the text-mode interfaces of early networked systems such as Usenet, BBS, Minitel, and Ceefax.
- •The article explains that text-art forms vary across computing systems, citing examples such as PETSCII, ANSI, ATASCII, and Shift-JIS.