ANSI Art: Colour from Characters

ANSI art combines text characters, code page 437 glyphs and ANSI escape sequences to build colourful screens. Instead of pixel images, the terminal draws lines, blocks and shapes from character cells.

As colour-capable terminals and BBS software became popular, artists produced welcome screens, menus and elaborate scene art. Tools such as TheDraw helped artists compose ANSI graphics.

Traditional ANSI often assumed an 80-column text display. Modern websites can imitate the look using monospace type, precise spacing, vivid accents and dark backgrounds — though a browser is not a full DOS terminal emulator.