From ASCII Art to Comic Sans

A fresh and provocative take on typography, computing, and popular culture, viewed through four idiosyncratic typographical phenomena from the digital age.

From ASCII Art to Comic Sans offers an original vision of the history of typography and computing in the digital age, viewed through the lens of offbeat typography. We often regard text as pure information and typography as a transparent art form without meaning of its own. In this richly illustrated book, however, Karin Wagner offers a fresh perspective that shows how text is always an image that conveys meaning, and how typography, far from being meaningless, has in fact shaped modern visual and material culture in significant ways.
By juxtaposing four odd typographical phenomena—the pedantic practice of ASCII art, the curious-looking machine-readable typefaces, the blurry letters of dot matrix printers, and the much-maligned font Comic Sans—Wagner paints a vivid picture of how functional technologies influence popular culture when used in ways their original creators never intended.

Design practitioners, as well as fans of media, graphic design, type history, and computer technology, will enjoy this breezily sophisticated perspective on visual and digital culture. Spanning the material and visual aspects of typography from the 1960s to the present, From ASCII Art to Comic Sans is a unique contribution to the study of popular and material culture that fills a gap in the history of typography and computing.Acknowledgments vii
1 Introduction 1
2 Computer Pictures Before Computer Graphics: The Practice of ASCII Art 27
3 Domesticated Aliens: Machine-Readable Typefaces in Popular Culture and Beyond 75
4 The Multisensory Dot Matrix Printer 117
5 Type Hate and the Discourse of Comic Sans 161
6 Common Themes and Concluding Remarks 199
Notes 209
Index 243"… From ASCII Art to Comic Sans: Typography and Popular Culture in the Digital Age emerges as a landmark study that scrutinises the evolution of typography in the digital and post-digital era. Merging media archaeology with visual and cultural studies, Wagner’s book stands as a pivotal resource for scholars, designers, and anyone fascinated by the confluence of technology, culture, and design.”
—NECSUS“In this sharp book, Wagner justifies digital typography as a media archaeological subject by taking the jagged contours of the electronic alphabet seriously, as actual letterforms, with their own historically resonant shapes, identities, and materialities.”
— Matthew Kirschenbaum, Professor of English, University of Maryland; author of Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage
 
“This delightful book takes us on a journey from unruly fonts and letters to technostalgia and type hate. Illustrated by rich imagery and vivid anecdotes, it highlights the continued significance of displaced typographic phenomena in computing and popular culture.”
— Janneke Adema, Associate Professor of Digital Media, Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University; author of Living Books: ExperimentsKarin Wagner is Professor in Art History and Visual Studies in the Department of Cultural Sciences at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Researching photography, digital culture, design, and visual communication, she has published articles in Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Visual Communication, Museum & Society, and Archival Science.