Portraits made of text

A face that turns out to be made entirely of letters, dots and symbols: dense @ and # where the light falls, faint dots and colons in the shadows, usually green on black like an old terminal. In @johnknopf's ASCII self-portrait (570K views, 26 September), a face made of scrolling characters types out its own introduction. @cherry_mx_reds turned a coffee drinker into green terminal text as one of four restyles (156K views, 2 October). Tools for the look are spreading as well: effect.app has an ASCII filter for images and video, and ASCII Pixels turns any video into an ASCII website background.

Why it works

Your eye reads the face first and the characters second, and then it flips back. The image feels like something a machine is thinking, which is exactly the story AI and tech videos want to tell.

How to use the ingredient

ASCII Portrait draws a sculpted marble bust out of characters. It starts as scrambled symbols, settles into the face, turns slowly under a moving light, and a caption types itself out with a blinking cursor. You can change the Characters (classic, code symbols, binary or blocks), the Character size, the Character colour and Background (pick a light background for black ink on paper), the Screen glow, the Head turn and the Caption. The renderer also redraws anything already on a canvas, so you can turn your own footage, or a 3D ingredient like Black Hole, into text. Finish with Kinetic Title as an end card, or run VHS Camcorder over it for a 1987 terminal.

Limitation

The face is an idealised statue built from simple shapes, not a real person. For a real likeness, draw your own footage first and let the renderer convert it.