Create ASCII Art Designs Easily with Mockdown
ASCII art is a unique plain text art style that you might have seen over the years when connecting to a remote server via the command line, or perhaps a BBS, or something silly like watching Star Wars in ASCII art from the Terminal. It’s a distinct style of artwork for plain text situations on shells, man pages, MUDs, BBSs, readme files, and more, and originates way back in the world of text-based command prompts of Apple II, unix, DOS, and the BBS days of pre-internet (and maybe before that!). If you’re a longtime reader here you might even recall using the command line to create an ASCII art banner.
If you’d like to create some really fanciful ASCII artwork, a neat web based tool is available called Mockdown, that offers a simple and easy to use grid for building ASCII artwork and diagrams. It’s all ASCII, creating plain text boxes, arrows, labels, and style, and is an impressively capable tool for building ASCII layouts right in the web browser.
Use the browser based tools to sketch out your ASCII design or ASCII art, and then you can copy it to your clipboard and paste it into any plain text file for use.
As you can see in my rather unattractive example, it’s quite easy to use, and likely anything you create will be better looking than the monstrosity I came up with to demonstrate this. If you’re going to paste your ASCII creation into TextEdit, it’s a good idea to set TextEdit to make new files in Plain Text instead of RTF, though you can also convert from RTF rich text to plain text with TextEdit after the fact too.
Whether that’s a welcome message to yourself or others for SSH connections, building plain text art for a project, making ASCII art for a readme file or manual page, or whatever else you can imagine.
Aside from making fun ASCII art you can also use Mockdown for things like early stage UI ideas, prototyping, outlining user flows or diagrams, communicating structures and workflows to developers, and more.
Whether you’re an experienced UI/UX designer, or designer in general, or just a casual user who has fond memories of ASCII art splashing across the screen of an Apple II, DOS, or UNIX workstation, you might get a kick out of Mockdown, it’s pretty neat so check it out for a little retro fun.
