The Ascii Styles!

I would personally divide ASCII art into 2 main groups, the underground ascii and the mainstream ascii. The mainstream ascii refears to 2 styles of ascii and this is "line style" and "solid style". As you can see, "line styles" looks very similar to what we at the underground ascii scene refers to as "Oldschool" which uses the "/\" characters and "solid style" looks similar to "Newschool" which uses "$$" characters. The underground ascii scene also have "Block" style which is mostly ansi art without color (or similar). Block ascii is often used in nfo files for release groups.

Oldschool and Newschool are often used for file_id.diz's, on bbs'es, on ftp sites and on shells as motd files. In the mainstream ascii scene, they often use ascii characters to create humans, animals, flowers and etc. to put on their homepage or in their emails. The mainstream scene doesn't really connect to the underground scene, its linked too far away.

Then again you can divide the underground ascii scene into the PC Scene and the Amiga Scene. The PC Scene mostly release ascii art in packs, and the Amiga Scene releases ascii collies (a bunch of asciis gathered into 1 text file).

Oldschool	Newschool	Block	Mainstream

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