How to Make ASCII Art: FIGlet Fonts, Monospace & Discord
Long before emojis and image embeds, programmers decorated terminals, bulletin boards, and email signatures with letters built out of other letters. That retro style — ASCII art — never really died. You’ll still find giant text banners at the top of open‑source README files, in server login screens, in Discord channels, and in Twitch chat. The classic way to generate them is FIGlet, a 1991 program whose fonts are still the standard today. This guide shows you how to create your own ASCII banners in seconds, and how to paste them so they don’t turn into a scrambled mess.
What is FIGlet, exactly?
FIGlet (short for “Frank, Ian and Glenn’s letters”) is a program that takes normal text and renders each character as a small grid of symbols — slashes, underscores, pipes and hashes — using a font definition file. Different FIGlet fonts give completely different personalities: Standard looks clean and classic, Banner uses solid # blocks, Slant leans forward like italics, and novelty fonts turn letters into bubbles or 3‑D shapes.
Create your banner in 4 steps
- Open the ASCII Art Generator.
- Type your text — short words work best, because each letter becomes 6–8 characters wide.
- Pick one of the 8 FIGlet fonts. The preview updates live as you type, rendered in a monospace font so the alignment is exactly what you’ll get.
- Click Copy and paste the result wherever you need it.
Why your ASCII art looks broken when pasted
ASCII art only lines up in a monospace font, where every character has the same width. If you paste a banner into a proportional font (like this article’s font), the columns drift and the art collapses. The fix depends on the platform:
- Discord / WhatsApp: wrap the art in triple backticks (```) to force a code block.
- GitHub README: indent with four spaces or use a fenced code block.
- Terminals and code editors: already monospace — paste directly.
- Instagram / Facebook posts: avoid it — their fonts are proportional and will scramble the art.
Where people still use ASCII art
Startup banners for CLI tools, MOTD (message of the day) screens on servers, code comments that mark major sections, Discord server rules headers, Twitch chat spam art, and README headers that make a repository feel hand‑crafted. It costs zero bytes of images and works in any text‑only environment — that’s why it has outlived every graphics format trend since the 1980s.
Frequently Asked Questions
What characters does ASCII art use?
Classic FIGlet fonts stick to printable ASCII: letters, slashes ( / \ ), pipes ( | ), underscores ( _ ), hashes ( # ) and parentheses. That’s why the output works in terminals, plain‑text emails, and code files with no encoding issues.
Why does my ASCII art look fine in the tool but broken in chat?
The chat is rendering it in a proportional font. Wrap the art in a code block (triple backticks in Discord, Slack, or Markdown) so it renders in monospace and the columns line up again.
Can I use ASCII art in code comments?
Yes — it’s a long tradition. Big section banners in config files and source code make navigation easier. Just remember your team’s linter may flag very long lines.
Which FIGlet font should I choose?
Standard for a classic look, Slant or Small for compact headers, Banner for maximum visibility. Try a few — the generator previews all of them live with the same text.
Is the ASCII Art Generator free and private?
Yes — it is 100% free, needs no sign-up, and everything runs in your browser; your text never leaves your device.
Try the ASCII Art Generator