ToolsFlare
ToolsFlare
UtilityEntertainmentDeveloper

ASCII Art Generator

Turn any text into an ASCII art banner. Choose from 40+ figlet fonts including Standard, Slant, Doom, Big, ANSI Shadow and more. Copy or export as text or PNG. Free, browser-only.

Try:

Loading font: Standard…

Font

Standard

Spacing (kerning)

Wraps when the rendered banner exceeds this width.

Colors

What is an ASCII art generator?

An ASCII art generator turns plain text into a stylized multi-line banner made entirely of ASCII characters. The most famous engine is FIGlet — short for “Frank, Ian and Glenn's letters” — a 1991 program whose font files (.flf) are still the standard format today. Each glyph in a FIGfont is a small ASCII bitmap that the engine stitches together to render text.

These banners are everywhere in technical culture: CLI tool logos, server motd greetings, README headers, source-code section dividers, Discord servers, IRC channels, and the startup screens of modern AI agents. They're plain text, so they travel anywhere — chat, email, git commits, code comments — without losing fidelity.

What makes this generator different

40+ curated FIGlet fonts

Hand-picked from 300+ available: Standard, Slant, Big, Doom, ANSI Shadow, Shadow, Star Wars, Colossal, Bloody, Bubble, Roman, 3-D, and more.

Lazy-loaded fonts

Each font is downloaded only when you pick it — the page loads fast and stays fast even with the full library available.

5 kerning modes

Default, Full, Fitted, Controlled smushing, Universal smushing — control exactly how letters merge or stay apart.

4 export themes

Dark, Light, Phosphor green CRT, Amber terminal. The PNG export bakes in the chosen color scheme.

Live preview, instant

Every change — text, font, kerning, width — re-renders synchronously. No “Generate” button.

Copy, .txt, .png

Copy to clipboard for chat or code, download .txt for README files, or .png for social posts — all client-side.

Font picks by use case

Use caseRecommended fonts
CLI tool logoStandard, Slant, ANSI Shadow, Big
README headerBig, Standard, Colossal, Roman
Game / retro vibeStar Wars, Doom, Bloody, Stop, Sub-Zero
Compact / inlineSmall, Mini, Lean, Calvin S
Heavy / posterColossal, 3-D, 3D-ASCII, Isometric1, Larry 3D
Cyberpunk / sci-fiCyberlarge, Cybermedium, Speed, Digital, Computer
Decorative / funBubble, Graffiti, Crazy, Avatar, Tinker-Toy

Kerning (spacing) modes explained

  • Default. Uses each font's built-in kerning rules — what the font author intended. Start here.
  • Full. Letters never touch. Maximum readability, widest output. Good when the banner is small.
  • Fitted. Letters touch but never overlap. Tighter than Full, still very readable.
  • Controlled smushing. Letters merge using rules baked into the font — specific characters can “smush” together cleanly. The classic Figlet look.
  • Universal smushing. Aggressive merging regardless of rules. Tightest output, sometimes too tight to read.

Tips for great banners

  • Short text wins. 1–2 words read best. Long titles wrap and lose impact.
  • Match font to medium. Standard / Slant work in any terminal. Decorative fonts can break on narrow widths — preview before committing.
  • Use Width to wrap. Set Max width to match your README or terminal column count (usually 80 or 120) so the banner never overflows.
  • Match the case. Most figlet fonts are designed for one case — Standard looks better mixed, Banner is uppercase-first. Try both.
  • Working with photos? Use the Image to ASCII Art converter for image-based ASCII instead.

FIGlet, briefly

FIGlet was written in 1991 by Glenn Chappell, with later contributions from Ian Chai, John Cowan and Paul Burton. The original C source ran on UNIX terminals and produced banner-style headers for BBSes, email signatures and login screens. The format spread fast: hundreds of community-contributed fonts exist today, ranging from elegant calligraphic styles to brutalist block letters.

This page runs the figlet engine entirely in your browser using a curated selection of the most popular fonts. Each font is a small text file (FLF format) that's parsed on first use and cached for the rest of your session.

Privacy

All rendering happens in your browser. Your text is never sent to a server, no analytics fire on the input, and the .txt / .png exports are generated locally.